Computer Laboratory > Teaching > Course material 2008–09 > Computer Science Tripos Syllabus and Booklist 2008-2009 > Paper 1: Floating-Point Computation

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Paper 1: Floating-Point Computation

Lecturer: Professor A. Mycroft

No. of lectures: 6

This course is useful for the Part II courses Advanced Graphics and Digital Signal Processing.

Aims

This course has two aims: firstly to provide an introduction to (IEEE) floating-point data representation and arithmetic; and secondly to show, how naïve implementations of obvious mathematics can go badly wrong. An overall implicit aim is to encourage caution when using any floating-point value produced by a computer program.

Lectures

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

Recommended reading

Overton, M.L. (2001). Numerical computing with IEEE floating point arithmetic. SIAM.

Further reading - goes far beyond the course

Goldberg, D. (1991). What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic. ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 23, pp. 5-48.



next up previous contents
Next: Paper 2: Professional Practice Up: Lent Term 2009: Part Previous: Paper 2: Discrete Mathematics   Contents