I ran this down, because I have a particular interest in vectorizable function approximations. Particular those that exploit bit-banging to handle range normalization. (Anyone have a good reference for that?)
Regrettably, this is NOT from Hastings 1955. Hastings provides Taylor series and Chebyshev polynomial approximations. The OP's solution is a Pade approximation, which are not covered at all in Hastings.