For very large / very small numbers / computations that require a very dynamic range Everything is carried out to the base of 2 Encoding scheme, stores: - Sign - Exponent - Significand Industry Standard of representing floating point numbers: IEEE 754-1985/2019 --> Explains rules for arithmetic formats, interchange formats, rounding rules, operations & exception handling - 32-bit numbers called single precision, - 64-bit numbers called double precision, - Longer numbers called extended precision (used for intermediate results) #quantum