Dude my friend introduced this to me this and it is cool for you nerds and mathy people

Article: How JAVA’s Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere

Author: William Kahan, Father of Floating Point Arithmetic, Recepient of Turing Award, and most importantly, Professor at UCB!!! (although retired, he still wanders around randomly on campus).

Oh for you people who loves reading but lack technical knowledge, floating-point arithmetic is basically how computer calculate decimals and handle rounding issues without giving incorrect results.

Check him out on wikipedia if you’re interested.  Here’s a cool fact: he made Intel loss billions of dollars by pointing out a flaw in their processor on floating point arithmetic.

He’s one of the most awesome mathmatician disguised as a computer scientist, and I have the honor of auditing his class my first semester at Berkeley.  He likes to tell random stories and go off topic, and is pretty knowledgeful of a lot of random stuffs.  You can get him angry by using incorrect grammar and presented a flawed math proof (once he got mad and ranted for an hour about how important it is to write a rigorous proof).

He’s also an expert and big fan of numerical analysis, and is pretty sad about the ignorance of this field in the academia.  Once in a Putnam Competition solution discussion session he pwned another professor by giving a uber simple solution using numerical analysis, then afterwards he laments about how many people he saw recently don’t even know the techniques he used anymore.

So yeah cool guy, even if you don’t know the tech stuffs (I don’t know much either), you can browse through this article and just read the stories/examples, then starts to not trust computers and go brush up your math skillz :P.