Whether modelling how air flows across a wing or testing the function of the human brain, mathematics plays an important role in our growing understanding of the world.
Computers allow scientists to perform vast numbers of computations very quickly.
However, even with the fastest computers currently available, it can require days for a computer to do an analysis of brain activity. Therefore, scientists have traditionally relied on Sun and Alpha workstations to do their number crunching. These expensive computers are typically much faster than desktop PCs with real number computations. One solution to increasing the speed of real number processing is to use integers instead. These integer maths techniques are very useful for computer graphics, where precision is not critical.