Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

Appendix E. Number Systems

Here are only numbers ratified.

—William Shakespeare

Nature has some sort of arithmetic-geometrical coordinate system, because nature has all kinds of models. What we experience of nature is in models, and all of nature’s models are so beautiful.

It struck me that nature’s system must be a real beauty, because in chemistry we find that the associations are always in beautiful whole numbers—there are no fractions.

—Richard Buckminster Fuller

Objectives

In this appendix you will learn: To understand basic number systems concepts, such as base, positional value and symbol value. To understand how to work with numbers ...