Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on Computer Arithmetic

Peter Kornerup (1) , Paolo Montuschi (2) , Jean-Michel Muller (3, 4) , Eric Schwarz (5)

1 IMADA - Department of Mathematics and Computer Science [Odense]
2 DAUIN - Department of Computer Engineering
3 ARENAIRE - Computer arithmetic
4 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
5 Systems and Technology Division

COMPUTER arithmetic is the mother of all computer research and application topics, like mathematics (as the title of a famous book by E.T. Bell) is the queen and servant of sciences and arithmetic the queen of mathematics. The etymology itself of the word computer is intrinsically related to the concept of arithmetic and mathematics. Interesting to note is that the origin of the word computer comes from the Latin word computare, which is defined as count, evaluate, calculate the result. In all cases, the connection between computers and computer arithmetic goes beyond simple etymology reasons. Computers are designed either to perform a specific calculation or to have extensive programmability for many changing tasks. In either case, at a certain level this translates into doing computations and arithmetic evaluations.

Keywords: computer arithmetic

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Other [cs.OH]

Peter Kornerup, Paolo Montuschi, Jean-Michel Muller, Eric Schwarz. Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on Computer Arithmetic. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2009, 58 (2), pp.145-147. ⟨ensl-00383561⟩