Floating point numbers are immensely important to computer scientists because other scientists use computers to simulate natural phenomena and must use real numbers. This has been true since the inception of computers in the 1930s and 1940s (or even earlier if we include Babbage!) Hence computer designers have had lots of time to come up with various time and space-saving tricks. One of them is discussed in this section, that is, doing away with the first 1 in the (binary) mantissa. This is only possible if the mantissa is normalized.