In this paper we present an analytic altorithm which calculates almost sharp bounds for the normalized error term $(t-\psi(t))/\sqrt{ t}$ for $t\leq x$ in expected run time $O(x^{ 1/2+\varepsilon})$ for every $\varepsilon>0$. The method has been implemented and used to calculate the bound $|\psi(t) - t| \leq 0.94 \sqrt{ t}$ for $11< t\leq 10^{ 19}$. In particular, this bound implies that $\operatorname{ li}(t) - \pi(t) > 0$ for $t\in [2,10^{ 19}]$, which gives an improved lower bound for the Skewes number.
Categories: math.NT math.NA