Operations and Operands

Operators – special symbols that represent computations like addition and multiplication. The values of the operator is applied to are called operands.

Basic operators are given in the following table

Character	Function
+	Addition
-	Subtraction
*	Multiplication
/	Division
**	exponentiation

Example of the mathematical operations is given below

>>> 20 + 24 
44
>>> hour = 3
>>> hour -1 
2
>>>minutes = hour * 60 
>>>(50 + 9)*(15-7)
472
>>>52/60
0

As you can see from previous code the division operator might not do what you expect. The result of  52/60 is 0.86667 not 0. The reason for that is that Python is performing floor division. In older versions of Python before 3.0 the result is integer while in Python 3.0 the result of this division is a float.

Generally when both of the operands are integer, the result is also an integer, floor division chops off the fraction part, so in this example it rounds down to zero.

If either of the operands is a floating-point number, Python performs floating-point division, and the result is a float:

>>>52.0/60.0
0.8666666666666667