If you’d had asked us if converting integer division to floating point might make a program run faster, we’d have bet the answer was no, but we’d have been wrong.

An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy… ...

Floating point also enables calculating a wide range of numbers very quickly. Although floating point dates back thousands of years, the concept is the same today.

Before becoming adopted as a catch-phrase on TikTok, the term ‘flop’ was a short-hand for floating point operations per second. Floating point numbers are commonly known as “real” numbers ...