This course serves as an introduction to floating point arithmetic, and is for those who desire to learn about floating point representation and errors that can propagate due to a problem in floating point operations. Unlike other pages regarding floating point arithmetic, this page course will focus on readability and instruction. For additional details, you can see the floating point article on Wikipedia (here).

Lesson One: Introduction edit

The first lesson will describe who this lesson is for, and will go over what we are learning and how floating errors have been significantly costly, ending lives and costing the economy billions of dollars.

Lesson One

Lesson Two: All Your Base, Your Base, Base, Base edit

This lesson will delve into how to convert numbers to and from binary and decimal.

Lesson Two

Lesson Three: Binary Machines edit

This lesson will go over the way an arbitrary computer stores numbers, and gives exercises. Topics covered include the "hole-at-zero" and computer epsilon.

Lesson Three

Lesson Four: IEEE standard edit

This lesson will go over the IEEE standard, and how most computers store numbers.

Lesson Four

Lesson Five: Roundoff Problems edit

This lesson will analyze problems created with roundoff error.

Lesson Five