Scientific Notation Research Paper

scientific notation, its uses and rules for calculations. One example from everyday life: a computer hard disk holds 4 gigabytes of information, that is 4,000,000,000 bytes of information. Written in scientific notation, that is 4 X 109 bytes.

Scientific notation is used to write very large and very small numbers. While ordinary numbers are useful for everyday measurements, for large measurements like astronomical distances, scientific notations offers a way of expressing very large and small numbers in a concise way.

Scientific notation is based on powers of ten. Because many large and small numbers consist of just a few integers plus many zeros, the power of ten can be used to shorten the length of the written number. A number that is written in correct scientific notation is made up of three parts.The first part, the coefficient, is a number between 1 and 10. The second part, the base, is a power of ten. The third part is the exponent, which shows the number of decimal places that the decimal must be moved to change the number to standard notation. A negative exponent means that the decimal is moved to the left when converting a number to standard notation.

The mathematical formula for writing a number in scientific notation is:

n x 10x

where n is a number greater than 1 but less than 10 and x is an exponent of 10.

Follow these steps to convert large and small numbers into scientific notation:

1. Put….....