I was plotting the relative error of the $e^{11/12 -n}n^{n+1/2}$ approximation to the factorial as $n$ gets larger and larger and at after some very large value of $n$ mathematica gives this plot:
Can somebody explain what exactly it means? Of course, I understand that for larger and larger $n$ the relative error tends to a value but I am not sure about how to interpret this graph. In particular, I don't understand how can the error be bigger for some $n$ than for some greater $n$.
Thanks.
Edit: I want to add that when $n$ is an order of magnitude less what I get is something like this:
It is possible for the first plot that you are hitting the limit of numerical precision in Mathematica - for large $n$ you are subtracting two very large numbers (for the absolute error, not the relative error) so it is possible that you are losing precision when you get to these values. The resulting rounding errors would cause the spikes in the $\delta(n!)$ function.
If there's a way of increasing the number of digits in the floating point representations, try that to see whether this reduces the spikes. Mathematica allows arbitrary precision numbers, so I would look those up and see if you can rewrite your calculation to include more significant digits.