A fact from Pairwise summation appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 March 2010 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that pairwise summation of a sequence (breaking it in half and summing each half separately first) greatly reduces rounding errors?
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Latest comment: 4 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
After reading this article, I could not tell *why* pairwise summation improves on the accuracy of ordinary summation. An estimation of the error is given, but without derivation, so I could not understand what makes this algorithm more accurate, esp. because it is mentioned that the number of additions is actually the same as ordinary summation. The article could be improved by explaining/giving some intuition for why this algorithm is more accurate.
Polluxonis (talk) 18:50, 6 June 2020 (UTC)Reply
