Numerical Methods

The computer is a tool for storage, manipulation, and presentation of data. The data may be numbers, text, or images, but no matter what the data are, they must be coded into a sequence of 0s and 1s because that is what the computer stores. For each type of data, there are several ways of coding. For any unique coding scheme, the primary considerations are efficiency in storage, retrieval, and computations. Each of these considerations may depend on the computing system to be used. Another important consideration is coding that can be shared or transported to other systems.