Factorial Approximations

(and its logarithm) keep showing up in the analysis of algorithm. Unfortunately, it’s very often unwieldy, and we use approximations of (or ) to simplify things. Let’s examine a few!

How many bits?

In this quarantine week, let’s answer a (not that) simple question: how many bits do you need to encode sound and images with a satisfying dynamic range?

Let’s see what hypotheses are useful, and how we can use them to get a good idea on the number of bits needed.