Talk:Scientific notation

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Contents 1 Standard index notation 2 suggested paragraph 3 breaking quantities 4 Cleaning Up 5 parenthesis notation 6 Fortran

[edit] Standard index notation

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)

[edit] suggested paragraph

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.

[edit] breaking quantities

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

You can force quantities to break as one word with the "non-breaking space" ( ): 1.2 × 10³¹. Besides, 1.2E31 is very ugly "calculator notation". I nearly cried when I saw someone use it on his math test paper. – Boudewijn 1 July 2005 12:12 (UTC)

1.2E³¹ is incorrect, as stated on this page. Fresheneesz 04:13, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleaning Up

What needs cleaning up about this article? Lochok 04:03, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

It's not as bad as when the request was orginally made, but there are still a proliferation of one sentence paragraphs and I usually find a couple typos or redundancies everytime I look at it. It is much better now. The label can probably go soon. Jmeppley 22:21, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] parenthesis notation

Should also explain parenthesis notation indicating error, e.g., "1.345(67)".

[edit] Fortran

In Fortran, I recall that their exponential notation sometimes uses a 'd' instead of 'e'. For example, a number might be written as 1.234d-4 meaning the same thing as 1.234 * 10^-4 . I could have been incorrectly informed, but I think this would be a nice note on this page if someone can find a source for it (I looked quickly, but didn't find anything). Fresheneesz 04:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)