Education

Floating-Point Resources

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This is a work-in-progress list of educational resources on floating-point representations and other computer numerics topics.

• "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg (1991)
• "Do Developers Understand IEEE Floating Point" by Peter Dinda and Conor Hetland (2018)
• "Floating Point Visually Explained" by Fabien Sanglard (2017)
• IEEE 754-2019 (latest IEEE floating-point standard)
• "Floating-point arithmetic" article on Wikipedia

• "IEEE Format for Binary Floating Point Numbers" POGIL activity by Pam Smallwood (2023)
• "Real Numbers in Binary", a section in the "Dive Into Systems" online systems textbook by Suzanne J. Matthews, Tia Newhall, and Kevin C. Webb (2022)
• "Floating Point" flipped-classroom lecture videos by Mike Lam (2020) w/ accompanying slides based on content from CS:APP3e textbook by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron (2015)
• "Reproducibility in Parallel Computing using Floating-Point Arithmetic" "peachy assignment" by Ganesh Gopalakrishnan (2018)

• "Floating Point Numbers" by Computerphile w/ Tom Scott (2014)
• "Floating Point Numbers Part 1 (FP vs Fixed)" by Computerphile w/ Steven Bagley (2019)
• "Floating Point Numbers Part 2 (FP Addition)" by Computerphile w/ Steven Bagley (2019)
• "Visualizing the Floating Point Format" by Akash Murthy (2022)
• "What Every 21st Century Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" workshop talk by Bill Zorn (2022)
• "Z-Fighting" video about floating-point artifacts in 3d rendering by Jamie King (2012)
• "Floats" video about floating-point discretization in Super Mario 64 by Pannenkoek2012

• IEEE 754 calculator by Edmund Weitz
• IEEE 754 visualization by Bartek Szopka
• IEEE 754 visualization by Bartosz Ciechanowski
• IPython visualizer notebook by Giovanni Carmantini
• Floating-point demo utility by Mike Lam
• FP materials by Artem Yadrov
• William Kahan's website with links to various publications and files
• "NaN Gates" and "GradIEEEnt half decent" projects by Tom Murphy ("Tom 7")
• Relevant xkcd

This list is primarily maintained for the FPBench research community by Mike Lam. If you know of a resource that isn't linked here, please email the FPBench list.