because they are a good approximation of real numbers. another question to ask is why did we land on real numbers as the standard? because they are a good app

because they are a good approximation of real numbers. another question to ask is why did we land on real numbers as the standard? because they are a good approximation of a lot of physical processes, like sine and cosine which are endemic in graphics, physics, electronics, signal processing, radio, etc. one could even make the argument that video games have driven floating point processors in a lot of the CPU / GPU industry. but of course they are not the only way to do things. some geometry packages use rational number types, some financial systems use a base-10 Decimal number type, mathematicians studying number theory need the Big Integer type (unlimited digits), but these are small use cases for a small number of people relatively. so floats are very convenient way for a huge number of people. and the number of people who need to use other number types is rather small which is why they are not implemented in a CPU. which makes them slower , which means they are even less desirable for a lot of applications. as we see new software, we see new number formats, like for neural networks "float 8" , an 8 bit floating point number, are becoming a thing. which would be incomprehensible why you would want such a thing to most people 20 years ago and yet now it is in mainstream GPU products. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38975770/python-numpy-float16-datatype-operations-and-float8 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38975770/python-numpy-fl...