Get the latest tech news

Perspectives on Floating Point


An illuminating perspective on floating point numbers that I haven't seen emphasized before.

We won’t get into all the nitty gritty details of the IEEE standard (like how to deal with 0 and inf) – this video by Jan Misali does a splendid job of that. \\ \end{align*} }\] In the computer, all algorithms are ultimately a composition of the fundamental arithmetic operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Catastrophic cancellation – numerical instability due to blow up of relative error when subtracting two nearly equal floating point numbers.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of Floating Point

Floating Point

Photo of Perspectives

Perspectives