[Editor's note: For an intro to fixed-point math, see Fixed-Point DSP and Algorithm Implementation. For a comparison of fixed- and floating-point hardware, see Fixed vs. floating point: a surprisingly ...

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 ...

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 ...

On February 25, 1991, during the eve of the of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a Scud missile fired from Iraqi positions hit a US Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A defense was available – ...

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 ...

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 ...

Embedded C and C++ programmers are familiar with signed and unsigned integers and floating-point values of various sizes, but a number of numerical formats can be used in embedded applications. Here ...

Floating-point arithmetic is a cornerstone of modern computational science, providing an efficient means to approximate real numbers within a finite precision framework. Its ubiquity across scientific ...