Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In 1946, Arthur Burks used the terms mantissa and characteristic to describe the two parts of a floating-point number (Burks [11] et al.) by analogy with the then-prevalent common logarithm tables: the characteristic is the integer part of the logarithm (i.e. the exponent), and the mantissa is the fractional part.
The way in which the significand (including its sign) and exponent are stored in a computer is implementation-dependent. The common IEEE formats are described in detail later and elsewhere, but as an example, in the binary single-precision (32-bit) floating-point representation, p = 24 {\displaystyle p=24} , and so the significand is a string ...
The part of the representation that contains the significant figures (1.30 or 1.23) is known as the significand or mantissa. The digits in the base and exponent ( 10 3 or 10 −2 ) are considered exact numbers so for these digits, significant figures are irrelevant.
Mantissa (/ m æ n ˈ t ɪ s ə /) may refer to: Mantissa (logarithm), the fractional part of the common (base-10) logarithm; Significand (also commonly called mantissa), the significant digits of a floating-point number or a number in scientific notation; Mantissa (band) Mantissa, a 1982 novel by John Fowles; Mantissa College
The sign bit determines the sign of the number, which is the sign of the significand as well. The exponent field is an 8-bit unsigned integer from 0 to 255, in biased form: a value of 127 represents the actual exponent zero.
Discover the best free online games at AOL.com - Play board, card, casino, puzzle and many more online games while chatting with others in real-time.
Now we can read off the fraction and the exponent: the fraction is .01 2 and the exponent is −3. As illustrated in the pictures, the three fields in the IEEE 754 representation of this number are: sign = 0, because the number is positive. (1 indicates negative.) biased exponent = −3 + the "bias".
A 2-bit float with 1-bit exponent and 1-bit mantissa would only have 0, 1, Inf, NaN values. If the mantissa is allowed to be 0-bit, a 1-bit float format would have a 1-bit exponent, and the only two values would be 0 and Inf. The exponent must be at least 1 bit or else it no longer makes sense as a float (it would just be a signed number).