Return to my Mathematics pages
Go to my home page
© Copyright 2000, Jim Loy
Large (and small) numbers can be written in many ways. 375,000,000,000 is cumbersome and maybe confusing. In America it is called 375 billion. In most of the rest of the world it is called 375 thousand million (See Million, Billion, Trillion...). Even if you keep that straight, you may not remember the names for larger numbers, like nonillions.
Scientists (and other people) use scientific notation for large and small numbers. A number in this notation is written as a decimal number between one and 10 times an integer power of ten:
3.75x10^11 (or 3.75x1011)=375,000,000,000
6.7x10^-20 (or 6.7x10-20)=0.00000 00000 00000 00006 7
Here ^ means power. Normally we just write the superscript number, which some WWW browsers cannot handle) These numbers are much more compact, and easier to read. In computer programming, this is often written slightly differently: 375,000,000,000=3.75E11.
OK, what is 3.75x10^11 + 6.7x10^-20? The answer 375,000,000,000.00000 00000 00000 00006 7 is ridiculous. Neither number implies that kind of accuracy (See Superfluous Accuracy). The answer is 3.75x10^11. compared to 3.75x10^11, 6.7x10^-20 is the same as zero.