Talk:Scientific notation
From Academic Kids
The name I've always been taught is something like 'standard index notation'.
- If you don't remember what it was then the teaching must have been rather ineffective. Are you sure it wasn't "index standard anecdotal notation"?
'Scientific notation' seems a bit vague - aren't there many other scientific notations?
- It is a fairly commonly understood phrase. Yes there are many other scientific notations, but are there any that could be referred to without qualification? – Smyth 15:34, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Should the following paragraph (or parts of) from Floating point be put on this page?
- In other words, we could represent a number a by two numbers m and e, such that a = m × be. In any such system we pick a base b (called the base of numeration, also radix) and a precision p (how many digits to store). m (which is called the mantissa, also significand) is a p digit number of the form +-d.ddd...ddd (each digit being an integer between 0 and b-1 inclusive). If the leading digit of m is non-zero then the number is said to be normalised.
If we follow a convention of writing 1.2E31 instead we can avoid the problem of having a break in the quanity...1.2 x
1031 Pizza Puzzle
