Mathematical operations in Java

This section looks at how to perform various types of calculation in Java. Depending on your needs, there are essentially two "frameworks" for doing calculations:

for most "everyday" calculations, Java's built-in primitive types provide the fastest, simplest solution: operations on ints, longs, floats, doubles are straightforward to program and generally map directly on to low-level processor instructions, allowing most to complete in the order of a nanosecond with any stored numbers taking up a few bytes of memory;
for special cases, the BigInteger and BigDecimal classes allow decimal numbers with an arbitrary number of digits to be stored and calculated on, up to the limits of available memory; the time and memory requirements then depend more heavily on the operation being performed and the number of digits involved, and the code involved can be a little clumsier.

Calculations with primitive types

On the next and subsequent pages, we look at floating point primitive operations in Java: that is, operations on the float and double data types.

Calculations with `BigInteger` and `BigDecimal`

For more specialist applications, we later look at the BigInteger and BigDecimal classes, which allow representation of— and calculations on— numbers with an arbitrary number of digits. We include a look at the performance of BigInteger/BigDecimal operations, in particular an analysis of the performance of multiplication.

Written by Neil Coffey. Copyright © Javamex UK 2011. All rights reserved. If you have any feedback on the Java collections tutorials in this section or about the content of this site in general, please leave a message on the Javamex forum.

Mathematical operations in Java

Calculations with primitive types

Calculations with BigInteger and BigDecimal

Calculations with `BigInteger` and `BigDecimal`