A floating point number is, in normal mathematical terms, a real number. It's of the form: 1.0, 64.369, -55.5555555, and so forth. It basically means that the number can have a number a digits after a decimal point.
The mantissa - also known as a significand or coefficient - is the part of a floating-point number which contains the significant digits of that number. In the common IEEE 754 floating point...
Floating point numbers are typically stored as numbers in scientific notation, but in base 2. A certain number of bits represent the mantissa, other bits represent the exponent. - This is a highly...
It is somewhat complicated (search for the IEEE floating-point representation for more details), but the basic idea is that you have a few bits for the base, and a few bits for the exponent. The...