The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

I find it occasionally necessary to represent integral values with floating-point numeric types. Some reasons why this may be necessary include, but are not limited to: Compatibility with legacy code ...

Computer processors can only understand binary code, but not all data can be easily represented in that format, thus posing an interesting challenge. For example, in order to represent negative ...

First of all, it’s a power of 2. That’s undoubtedly not the most obvious thing unless you’re some kind of mathematical genius. And, to be exact, it’s 2^31. That’s significant — as you’ll see in a ...

We casually speak of digital audio, often referring to it as AES audio, perhaps AES3 (for the number of the AES standard), or by an older term AES/EBU. But what exactly is this AES3 signal? Here’s the ...

When most folks use a pocket calculator to perform some mathematical task like division, they rarely pause to ponder what's actually going on “under-the-hood”; instead, they simply accept the result ...

One key fact associated with rounding is that it involves transforming some quantity from a greater precision to a lesser precision. For example, suppose that we average out a range of prices and end ...

Is a 64-bit computer in your future? With all of the hype surrounding 64-bit processors, you probably assume that my answer would be an unequivocal “yes-and pretty darn soon, too!” But put aside the ...