Large Numbers - Using Scientific Notation To Handle Large and Small Numbers

Using Scientific Notation To Handle Large and Small Numbers

See also: scientific notation, logarithmic scale, and orders of magnitude

Scientific notation was created to handle the wide range of values which occur in scientific study. 1.0 × 109, for example, means one billion, a 1 followed by nine zeros: 1 000 000 000, and 1.0 × 10−9 means one billionth, or 0.000 000 001. Writing 109 instead of nine zeros saves readers the effort and hazard of counting a long series of zeros to see how large the number is.

Read more about this topic:  Large Numbers

Famous quotes containing the words scientific, handle, large, small and/or numbers:

    “I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And the importance of scientific method in modern practical life—always growing and increasing—is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are the strength of the priests.”
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    “If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner.... Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another—cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.”
    —Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    “...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
    —Mary Pickford (1893–1979)

    “Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
    Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
    Loving me in secret.
    It is here. At a touch of my hand,
    The air fills with delicate creatures
    From the other world.”
    —James Wright (1927–1980)

    “He bundles every forkful in its place,
    And tags and numbers it for future reference,
    So he can find and easily dislodge it
    In the unloading. Silas does that well.
    He takes it out in bunches like birds’ nests.”
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)