I was trying to evaluate Legendre polynomial $P_{n}(x)$ for a very large n, and it seems for n greater than 50 or so sage gives wrong answer. For eg.
P.<t> = QQ[]
legendre_P(90,t)(0.9)
gives 1.56319477427853e13 whereas wolfram alpha gives -0.08749. Is there an alternate way to calculate Legendre polynomials in sage, which would give the right answer.
The Legendre polynomial itself looks fine. To avoid the numerical imprecisions, you could work over QQ instead:
sage: legendre_P(90,t)(0.9)
1.56319477427853e13
sage: legendre_P(90,t)(QQ(0.9)).n()
-0.0874931768791928
It looks like you need 100+ bits of precision in order to evaluate the function in the original order:
sage: legendre_P(90, t)(RealIntervalField(100)("0.9"))
0.?e1
sage: legendre_P(90, t)(RealIntervalField(120)("0.9"))
-0.08749?
sage: legendre_P(90, t)(RealIntervalField(150)("0.9"))
-0.08749317687919?
The polynomial is very oscillatory in that there's a large amount of cancellation going on.
If you're really interested in the value, and only secondarily the polynomial, then you could use either scipy or mpmath, depending on how much precision you'll need:
sage: import scipy.special
sage: scipy.special.eval_legendre(90, 0.9)
-0.08749317687919235
sage: import mpmath
sage: mpmath.legendre(90, 0.9)
mpf('-0.08749317687919235')
Asked: 2014-01-16 13:38:01 +0100
Seen: 418 times
Last updated: Jan 16 '14
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