floating-point math If you ever looked at the screen on a handheld calculator and saw results like "64E7" or "286E-5," you've seen floating-point math in action. Those numbers are in floating-point notation (standing for 640,000,000 and 0.00286, respectively). Floating-point is a branch of mathematics often used in spreadsheet operations, and floating-point operations (called FLOPs) can be used to measure computing performance. See also: MFLOPS