
Dancing with Python
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It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies …
—Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Programming languages vary in their support for different kinds of numbers and mathematical structures. It’s not unusual to see floating-point numbers and integers that are limited in size by the hardware. For many computations in the sciences and engineering, we need larger numbers than those that fit in the fixed sizes.
In this chapter, I introduce many forms of numbers and other objects with which you can calculate in Python. We look at integers, fractions, floating-point numbers, random numbers, complex numbers, qubits (quantum bits), and symbolic objects like polynomials.
Topics covered in this chapter