IEEE 754
/ˈaɪ-tri-ˈtri-fɪv-foʊr/
noun — “the rulebook that tells computers how to lie about real numbers… consistently.”
IEEE 754 is a widely adopted standard for representing and performing arithmetic on floating-point numbers in digital systems. It defines how real numbers are encoded into binary, how operations like addition and multiplication behave, and what happens when numbers become too large, too small, or mathematically undefined.