Click above image to access the interactive version of this notebook

Numeric Types

As we mentioned in the opening to this section, in Python there are basically 3 built-in Numeric Data-Types

• int
• float
• complex

This sectino will illustrate a bit more about each.

int

Integers are the most basic numeric type in Python. Any number that does not contain a decimal point is considered as an integer and is of type int.

An interesting difference between the int type in Python and other languages is that they are variable precision. This means that the integer computation on other languages will overflow at either 2^31 or 2^63 (based on whether you have 32-bit or 64-bit CPU architecture). However, in Python, you can perform computation on numbers that are larger than these. (Actually, the precision of a number can increase till your computer runs out of memory)

# this will crash on C
2 ** 120

1329227995784915872903807060280344576

float

Floating point numbers contain the numbers with decimal point, that is they can hold the result of fractions or exponential numbers.

Any integer can be converted to float by passing it to the float constructor:

float(2)

2.0

2e4

20000.0

complex

Complex numbers are the numbers with real and imaginary parts. Just like int or float, we can construct a complex number by passing the arguments to the complex constructor:

c_val = complex(2, 3)
print(c_val)

(2+3j)

c_val.real

2.0

c_val.imag

3.0

c_val.conjugate() # complex conjugate of c_val

(2-3j)

Magnitude of a complex number:

i.e. $\sqrt{(c.real^2 + c.imag^2)}$

can be obtained by using abs function

abs(c_val)

3.605551275463989

We shall take a deeper look at these datatypes and the operations that can be performed on them in the Operators module.