Calculating Big (really really really really really MONSTEROUSLY BIG) numbers

The curious thing about programming and mathematics is that I'm not at all a good mathematician (C in Algebra 1, B in Geometry, D in Algebra 2), except when it comes to the computer, and the thing that has intrigued me most so far is the concept of computers being able to calculate extremely large numbers. Pi has been found to some odd billion digits, prime numbers (as far as we know) have been found using computers up to and beyond the 10 millionth digit (www.mersenne.org), and computers are used for other mathematical purposes as well (Seti, folding@Home, protein formations, etc).

The list is quite endless, I'm sure.

So as a novice programmer I also wanted to do something with higher math. Simply squaring numbers and all that is a little boring, yet the fibonacci sequence fascinated me, so I wrote a program to calculate that.

But it died after runs through the sequence. The 64 bits of data become clogged after about 19 digits, and fibonacci has been calculated to 10 million with some god-awful C++ code that was several lines long. So I asked the gods at www.javaranch.com, and they helped. The program no longer died after 91 runs through.

But then I realized that with an output to screen I couldn't retrieve the information, at all (what's the use of calculating a really really really big number if you can't get to it), which meant I had to solve another problem.

So I went searching, went on a journey, tried a bunch of things, looked at the hard-to-decipher-if-you-try-to-read-deep-in java docs, and then realized that the solution was right under my nose. The BigInteger class used to represent numbers larger than 64 bit (that is, 19 digits long or so) is an object. Every object has a toString method (returns it as a series of text). Text is savable to a file. My teacher went on about how these really big ass numbers are just strings of text..............

CLICK!

The only problem now is processing. The only solution for that is time.

Guess I'll be leaving something on overnight. Hey, fibonacci is already to the 100,000th digit :)