Using R to illustrate the Central Limit Theorem

"Kevin E. Thorpe" <kevin.thorpe at utoronto.ca> writes:

 

rparab <- function(nn) {
u <- 2*runif(nn) - 1
ifelse(u<0,-(abs(u)^(1/3)),u^(1/3))
}

It seems that in my version of R (2.0.1) on Linux, that calculating the cube
root of a negative number using ^(1/3) returns NaN. I looked at the help in
the arithmetic operators and did help.search("cube root"),
help.search("root")
and help.search("cube") and recognised no alternatives. So I used an
ifelse() to
deal with the negatives. Have I missed something really elementary?
   

Not really. You might have used u <- runif(nn,-1,1) and
sign(u)*abs(u)^(1/3) instead of the ifelse construct (remember that
ifelse generally evaluates both the 'yes' and 'no' parts and on some
architectures the NaN results may be slow to compute).