As defined by the IEEE 754 standard, floating-point values are represented in three fields: a significand or mantissa, a sign bit for the significand and an exponent field. The exponent is a biased ...

An iconic example of this is the failure of the first Ariane 5 launch in 1996. Just 37 seconds after launch, the rocket left its trajectory began to spin uncontrollably and eventually self-destructed.