The deviate,
, associated with the lower tail probability,
, of the
-distribution with degrees of freedom
and
is defined as the solution to
where
;
.
The value of
is computed by means of a transformation to a beta distribution,
:
and using a call to
g01fec.
For very large values of both
and
, greater than
, a normal approximation is used. If only one of
or
is greater than
then a
approximation is used; see
Abramowitz and Stegun (1972).
The result should be accurate to five significant digits.
For higher accuracy
g01fec can be used along with the transformations given in
Section 3.