Why Do We Need Floating Point Numbers?
Learn why floating point representation is essential.
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Scientific notation
Imagine you are a physicist, and you need to do some calculations. You want to multiply the speed of light, which is , with the tiny number . You can see that both of them take up a lot of space even in the decimal notation, and writing them out and multiplying them would be difficult. To tackle this problem in the decimal system, we use scientific notation.
To represent a decimal number in scientific notation, we set the decimal point to the right of the first non-zero digit in the number and set the power of ...