Although it’s tempting to think that computers can do anything, they are not without their limitations. For example, computers’ limited memory makes them unable to compute real numbers. So, when a ...

Providing a broad overview of numerical computing in a historical context, this concise text takes the reader from floating point representation and correctly rounded arithmetic, to an understanding ...

Floating-point arithmetic provides a practical means of representing real numbers on digital computers by encoding them in a finite number of bits for sign, exponent and significand. The IEEE-754 ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Last month, I wrote about the hype ...

Hardware for integer or fixed-point arithmetic is relatively simple to design, at least at the register-transfer level. If the range of values and precision that can be represented with these formats ...

In 1985, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) established IEEE 754, a standard for floating point formats and arithmetic that would become the model for practically all FP ...