Bessel's labyrinth -- rounding errors are not necessarily small (Q998616)

In this paper and school-project, it is demonstrated that rounding errors can accumulate quickly so as to lead to meaningless results in an apparently harmless case. The chosen case for this example is the recursion which computes Bessel functions of the first kind. An algorithm is demonstrated which enables the stable computation of the values of the Bessel function in spite of the problem of the original recursion.