All numerical algorithms we will illustrate in this book take some numbers in input and provide some numbers as their final output. It is necessary, therefore, to be aware of some fundamental facts about numbers and know how numbers are handled by nowadays computers. In this chapter we go over rational and irrational numbers and their positional notation (Section 1.1), how numbers are represented in nowadays computers (Section 1.2) and the standard format for representing real numbers (Section 1.3).
Programming. We introduce performing basic computations, assigning values to variables and printing numerical variables (Section 1.4).
