[inkyoto]

> […] pre-calculated lookup tables […]

The approach is older than that. I remember my grandfather's engineering books from 1950's – nearly each of them had a large addendum with the said pre-calculated sine, cosine, tangent and logarithm lookup tables. And there was at least one book that only had such tables and no other information.

That is how engineers used to calculate before the advent of computers.

[aoanla]

The classic of this field of books is Abramowitz and Stegun's "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" - although the two listed names are merely those of the compilation editors, as the calculations of the numerous tables of values (and sheets of mathematical identities) required hundreds of human computers operating for years. Ironically, on publication in 1964 it was just in time to see the dawn of the electronic computer age that would supplant it.

[albrewer]

I still use it when testing implementations of mathematical functions. Like if all I need is a bessel function, why pull in a whole CAS to do that?