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Most decimal fractions (or most fractions in general) cannot be represented exactly as a fraction with a denominator that is a power of two. For example, the simple decimal fraction 0.3 (3 ⁄ 10) might be represented as 5404319552844595 ⁄ 18014398509481984 (0.299999999999999988897769…). This inexactness causes many problems that are ...
Huberto M. Sierra noted in his 1956 patent "Floating Decimal Point Arithmetic Control Means for Calculator": [1] Thus under some conditions, the major portion of the significant data digits may lie beyond the capacity of the registers. Therefore, the result obtained may have little meaning if not totally erroneous.
The order of operations, that is, the order in which the operations in an expression are usually performed, results from a convention adopted throughout mathematics, science, technology and many computer programming languages. It is summarized as: [2] [5] Parentheses; Exponentiation; Multiplication and division; Addition and subtraction
A repeating decimal or recurring decimal is a decimal representation of a number whose digits are eventually periodic (that is, after some place, the same sequence of digits is repeated forever); if this sequence consists only of zeros (that is if there is only a finite number of nonzero digits), the decimal is said to be terminating, and is not considered as repeating.
For the even positive integers , one has the relationship to the Bernoulli numbers: = + (!). The computation of () is known as the Basel problem.The value of () is related to the Stefan–Boltzmann law and Wien approximation in physics.
Moreover, in the standard decimal representation of , an infinite sequence of trailing 0's appearing after the decimal point is omitted, along with the decimal point itself if is an integer. Certain procedures for constructing the decimal expansion of x {\displaystyle x} will avoid the problem of trailing 9's.
For instance, the rational numbers , , and are written as 0.1, 3.71, and 0.0044 in the decimal fraction notation. [100] Modified versions of integer calculation methods like addition with carry and long multiplication can be applied to calculations with decimal fractions. [ 101 ]
In mathematics, "rational" is often used as a noun abbreviating "rational number". The adjective rational sometimes means that the coefficients are rational numbers. For example, a rational point is a point with rational coordinates (i.e., a point whose coordinates are rational numbers); a rational matrix is a matrix of rational numbers; a rational polynomial may be a polynomial with rational ...