Special functions are pervasive in all fields of science and industry. The most well-known application areas are in physics, engineering, chemistry, computer science and statistics. Because of their importance, several books and websites (see for instance http: functions.wolfram.com) and a large collection of papers have been devoted to these functions. Of the standard work on the subject, namely the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with formulas, graphs and mathematical tables edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun, the American National Institute of Standards claims to have sold over 700.000 copies But so far no project has been devoted to the systematic study of continued fraction representations for these functions. This handbook is the result of such an endeavour. We emphasise that only 10% of the continued fractions contained in this book, can also be found in the Abramowitz and Stegun project or at the Wolfram website

Special functions are pervasive in all fields of science and industry. The most well-known application areas are in physics, engineering, chemistry, computer science and statistics. Because of their importance, several books and websites (see for instance http: functions.wolfram.com) and a large collection of papers have been devoted to these functions. Of the standard work on the subject, the Handbook of mathematical functions with formulas, graphs and mathematical tables edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun, the American National Institute of Standards claims to have sold over 700 000 copies!

But so far no project has been devoted to the systematic study of continued fraction representations for these functions. This handbook is the result of such an endeavour. We emphasise that only 10% of the continued fractions contained in this book, can also be found in the Abramowitz and Stegun project or at the Wolfram website!

The major emphasis of the Dagstuhl Seminar on "Numerical Validation in C- rent Hardware Architectures" lay on numerical validation in current hardware architecturesand softwareenvironments. The generalidea wasto bring together experts who are concerned with computer arithmetic in systems with actual processor architectures and scientists who develop, use, and need techniques from veri?ed computation in their applications. Topics of the seminar therefore included: - The ongoing revision of the IEEE 754/854 standard for ?oating-point ari- metic - Feasible ways to implement multiple precision (multiword) arithmetic and to compute the actual precision at run-time according to the needs of input data - The achievement of a similar behavior of ?xed-point, ?oating-point and - terval arithmetic across language compliant implementations - The design of robust and e?cient numerical programsportable from diverse computers to those that adhere to the IEEE standard - The development and propagation of validated special-purpose software in di?erent application areas - Error analysis in several contexts - Certi?cation of numerical programs, veri?cation and validation assessment Computer arithmetic plays an important role at the hardware and software level, when microprocessors, embedded systems, or grids are designed. The re- ability of numerical softwarestrongly depends on the compliance with the cor- sponding ?oating-point norms. Standard CISC processors follow the 1985 IEEE norm 754, which is currently under revision, but the new highly performing CELL processor is not fully IEEE compliant.