Scientific Notation

what's so scientific about it?

The name comes from scientists. They started using this notation because they dealt with such large numbers often.

It's about writing big or long numbers using exponents. You can do this for any base system.

Example - 350000 is written in this notation as 35×10⁴ or for example 0.000035 is written as 35×10⁻⁶

Exponent depends on just number of places the decimal point is shifted

Left shift - when decimal is shifted left, the exponent is positive. Right shift - when decimal is shifted right, the exponent is negative.

This one trick is enough to convert a number into scientific notation.

Normalization

Normalization sets how many digits are allowed before the decimal point.

Floating point standards like IEE 748 use normalization for this. IEE748 says there must be just one digit before the decimal point. See floating point operations for more information.