Data Types

7. Data Types#

When doing computational work, it is extremely important to be aware of any potential floating point errors. These are errors caused by the finite arithmetic setting of a computer. Here are a couple of tragic examples of real life disasters that occured do to floating point errors. This chapter will introduce how to increase the precision of calculuations to avoid such disasters.

We will also discuss a couple of new data types (complex and rational). Mathematicians often work with different sets of numbers (integers, rationals, reals, complex, etc), so it is important to be able to work with different data types when programming.