Floating-Point Computation
2008–09

Principal lecturer: Prof Alan Mycroft
Taken by: Part IA CST, Part IA NST, Part I PPS, Part IB
Syllabus
Past exam questions (see also below)

Lecturer-provided information:

• Course slides (as printed).
• An easy magazine article by Cleve Moler (The Mathworks, creators of MATLAB) conveying the feel of various ideas from this course
• Resources for Michael Overton's book "Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic"
• Mike O'Donohoe's notes for a previous course with a different syllabus
• Annotated subset of past exam questions for the previous Numerical Analysis course which remain useful.
• Illustrative C programs and their translation to Java
• (Different) Matlab/Octave programs (in preparation)
• Nick Maclaren's course "How Computers Handle Numbers – a.k.a. Computer Arithmetic Uncovered" for the Computing Service.

For the more adventurous:

• David Goldberg's article "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic"
• David Monniaux's article "The pitfalls of verifying floating-point computations"
• Some papers of William Kahan