[Numpy-discussion] common significant diigits

[Charles R Harris]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Benjamin Root <ben.root@ou.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am trying to solve a problem in matplotlib where I would have an array of
> floating point numbers and I want to quickly determine what is the closest
> common offset to a power of 10.  In other words, if given:
>
> [12373.43, 12375.89, 12370.18],
>
> I would want returned something like either 12370.0, or the lowest common
> order of magnitude (in this case, 10).
>
> Is there some sort of neat math/numpy trick to figure this out?  I already
> have a brute-force method with a while loop, but I am looking for something
> a little bit more elegant.
>
>
Something along the lines of

In [14]: ceil(log10(a.max() - a.min()))
Out[14]: 1.0

? I think this approach can be fixed up for whatever it is. I wasn't clear
on that.

Chuck
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