The Difference Between Engineering & Scientific Notation

Scientists and engineers often work with very large and very small numbers. The ordinary practice of using commas and leading zeroes proves to be very cumbersome in this situation. Scientific notation is more compact and less error prone method of representation. The number is split into two portions: a precision part (the mantissa) and a magnitude part (the exponent, being a power of ten). For example, the value 23,000 could be written as 23 times 10 to the 3rd power (that is, times one thousand). The exponent may be thought of in terms of how places the decimal point is moved to the left. Spelling this out is awkward, so a shorthand method is used where “times 10 to the X power” is replaced by the letter E (which stands for exponent). Thus, 23,000 could be written as 23E3. The value 45,000,000,000 would be written as 45E9. Note that it would also be possible to write this number as or even . The only difference between scientific notation and engineering notation is that for engineering notation the exponent is always a multiple of three. Thus, 45E9 is proper engineering notation but isn’t. On most scientific calculators E is represented by either an “EE” or “EXP” button. The process of entering the value 45E9 would be depressing the keys 4 5 EE 9. For fractional values, the exponent is negative and may be thought of in terms how many places the decimal point must be moved to the right. Thus, may be written as −3 or −4 or even 670E−6. Note that only the first and last of these three are acceptable as engineering notation. Engineering notation goes one step further by using a set of prefixes to replace the multiples of three for the exponent. #scientificNotation #exponent #labCalculations #Genetics #biology #computationalBiology #calculator #engineeringNotation #scientificNotationExplained #engineeringNotationExplained #engineeringNotationVsScientificNotation #engineeringNotationRules #engineeringNotationExamples #scientificNotationClass11Chemistry #howToDoScientificNotation #scientificNotationChemistry #whatIsScientificNotation