Encyclopedia > Truncation

  Article Content

Truncation

In mathematics, truncation is the term used for reducing the number of digits right of the decimal point, by discarding the least significant ones.

For example, given the real numbers:

5.6341432543653654
32.438191288
6.3444444444444

To truncate these numbers to 4 decimal digits, we only consider the 4 digits to the right of the decimal point.

The result would be:

5.6341
32.4381
6.3444

Note that in some cases, truncating would yield the same result as rounding, but truncation does not round up or round down the digits, it merely cuts off at the specified digit. The truncation error can be twice the maximum error in rounding.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Christiania

... a disambiguation page; that is, one that just points to other pages that might otherwise have the same name. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 21.5 ms