Of course this wreaks havoc with our idea of storing denormalized numbers. But not to worry. Clever hardware designers and their mathematician friends realized that if the exponent were 0, the lowest possible value, then the mantissa should represent itself exactly, without implying a leading 1. Thus, the smallest (in magnitude) normalized number would have an exponent of 00000000 and a mantissa of .10000000..... Note that the leading 1 is now .1 itself, not .11 as would be case if the exponent were 1 or larger. Then other denormalized numbers would still have an exponent of 00000000 and mantissas that were progressively smaller, with leading 0s, such as 00000000 .0100000000 and so forth. Though this makes the logic circuits more complex, it does continue to save space and improve accuracy while allowing denormalized numbers to still be represented.