ABSTRACT
You are a student of science, you have faith in the good people of the world. You have been told that computers represent everything with zeros and ones, and you have faith that the engineers of such machines have taken appropriate measures to make sure that everything will work out all right when you write programs and give and share information in decimal format. Indeed, you have run spreadsheets and simple codes and are reasonably sure that you are in fact getting the results you expect. But you also know that limitations exist and that no machine can remember a number with infinite precision; things have to break down somewhere. And if you are a good scientist, perhaps this has bothered you a little bit-both not knowing where things break down and not knowing what you do not know. In this chapter, we discuss what you have always wanted to know about machine numbers, whether or not you knew it.
