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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.
Engineering notation or engineering form (also technical notation) is a version of scientific notation in which the exponent of ten is always selected to be divisible by three to match the common metric prefixes, i.e. scientific notation that aligns with powers of a thousand, for example, 531×10 3 instead of 5.31×10 5 (but on calculator displays written without the ×10 to save space).
To approximate the greater range and precision of real numbers, we have to abandon signed integers and fixed-point numbers and go to a "floating-point" format. In the decimal system, we are familiar with floating-point numbers of the form (scientific notation): 1.1030402 × 10 5 = 1.1030402 × 100000 = 110304.02. or, more compactly: 1.1030402E5
For comparison, the same number in decimal representation: 1.125 × 2 3 (using decimal representation), or 1.125B3 (still using decimal representation). Some calculators use a mixed representation for binary floating point numbers, where the exponent is displayed as decimal number even in binary mode, so the above becomes 1.001 b × 10 b 3 d or ...
In addition, it supports arbitrary-precision floating-point numbers, bigfloats. Maple, Mathematica, and several other computer algebra software include arbitrary-precision arithmetic. Mathematica employs GMP for approximate number computation. PARI/GP, an open source computer algebra system that supports arbitrary precision.
Large-sized figures are often used to improve readability; while using decimal separator (usually a point rather than a comma) instead of or in addition to vulgar fractions. Various symbols for function commands may also be shown on the display. Fractions such as 1 ⁄ 3 are displayed as decimal approximations, for example rounded to 0.33333333.
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Zu Chongzhi is known to have computed π to be between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927, which was correct to seven decimal places. He also gave two other approximations of π : π ≈ 22 ⁄ 7 and π ≈ 355 ⁄ 113 , which are not as accurate as his decimal result.