# Division of Powers of Ten is wrong. Why?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-of-powers-of-ten-is-wrong-why/25744>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Tags:** numbers\
**Created:** [June 26, 2019, 8:32pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-of-powers-of-ten-is-wrong-why/25744 "2019-06-26T20:32:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2019, 8:34pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-of-powers-of-ten-is-wrong-why/25744/2 "2019-06-26T20:34:13Z")

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It’s not the division that was “wrong,” it was the exponentiation.

```julia
julia> 10^22
1864712049423024128

```

This is because Julia uses machine integer arithmetic — see:

> [@Julia messes up integer exponents?](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-messes-up-integer-exponents/20773/2):
>
> Julia uses actual machine integer arithmetic, which means that numbers can and do under- and overflow if you try to perform a computation outside of the range of values that can be represented by such an integer. See [Integer overflow - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_overflow) for more general explanation. If you actually need to deal with integers outside the range of a 64-bit Int, then you might want to use Julia’s built-in support for BigInt (which is much closer to the way integers behave in Python): julia\> big(10)^19 10…

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