01 Numbers
01 Numbers
Types of numbers
Python has various "types" of numbers (numeric literals). We'll mainly focus on integers and floating point
numbers.
Integers are just whole numbers, positive or negative. For example: 2 and -2 are examples of integers.
Floating point numbers in Python are notable because they have a decimal point in them, or use an exponential
(e) to define the number. For example 2.0 and -2.1 are examples of floating point numbers. 4E2 (4 times 10 to the
power of 2) is also an example of a floating point number in Python.
Throughout this course we will be mainly working with integers or simple float number types.
Here is a table of the two main types we will spend most of our time working with some examples:
1,2,-5,1000 Integers
Basic Arithmetic
In [1]:
# Addition
2+1
Out[1]:
3
In [2]:
# Subtraction
2-1
Out[2]:
1
In [3]:
In [3]:
# Multiplication
2*2
Out[3]:
4
In [4]:
# Division
3/2
Out[4]:
1.5
In [5]:
# Floor Division
7//4
Out[5]:
1
Whoa! What just happened? Last time I checked, 7 divided by 4 equals 1.75 not 1!
The reason we get this result is because we are using " floor " division. The // operator (two forward slashes)
truncates the decimal without rounding, and returns an integer result.
In [6]:
# Modulo
7%4
Out[6]:
3
4 goes into 7 once, with a remainder of 3. The % operator returns the remainder after division.
Arithmetic continued
In [7]:
# Powers
2**3
Out[7]:
8
In [8]:
In [9]:
# Order of Operations followed in Python
2 + 10 * 10 + 3
Out[9]:
105
In [10]:
Variable Assignments
Now that we've seen how to use numbers in Python as a calculator let's see how we can assign names and
create variables.
We use a single equals sign to assign labels to variables. Let's see a few examples of how we can do this.
In [11]:
# Let's create an object called "a" and assign it the number 5
a = 5
In [12]:
# Adding the objects
a+a
Out[12]:
10
In [13]:
# Reassignment
a = 10
In [14]:
# Check
a
Out[14]:
10
Yes! Python allows you to write over assigned variable names. We can also use the variables themselves when
doing the reassignment. Here is an example of what I mean:
In [15]:
# Check
a
Out[15]:
10
In [16]:
# Use A to redefine A
a = a + a
In [17]:
In [17]:
# Check
a
Out[17]:
20
The names you use when creating these labels need to follow a few rules:
Using variable names can be a very useful way to keep track of different variables in Python. For example:
In [18]:
# Use object names to keep better track of what's going on in your code!
my_income = 100
tax_rate = 0.1
my_taxes = my_income*tax_rate
In [19]:
# Show my taxes!
my_taxes
Out[19]:
10.0
So what have we learned? We learned some of the basics of numbers in Python. We also learned how to do
arithmetic and use Python as a basic calculator. We then wrapped it up with learning about Variable Assignment
in Python.