Bell Syst. Tech. J. 49(8), 1609-1625
ISSN / ISBN: Not available at this time
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the distribution of the mantissas of floating point numbers and shows how the arithmetic operations of a computer transform various distributions toward the limiting distribution r(x) = 1/(x ln b), 1/b≤x≤1, where b is the base of the number system. The paper also gives a number of applications to hardware, software, and general computing which show that this distribution is not merely an amusing curiosity. A brief examination of the distribution of exponents is included
Bibtex not available at this time.
Reference Type: Journal Article
Subject Area(s): Applied Mathematics