Talk:Scientific notation

message: 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)
thread_title: Standard index notation

message: 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)
replies: text: Better still use  ... don't use E notation if you're writing for humans. JIMp talk·cont 07:55, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: breaking quantities

message: What needs cleaning up about this article? Lochok 04:03, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Cleaning Up 

message: Re the 3rd paragraph - i believe it should read as follows:
*In normalized form, b is chosen such that 1 \le \left | a \right \vert < 10
rather than "a is chosen". Given a number we wish to represent in normalised form, the |a| value is determined (mod a power of 10) - there is nothing to choose. We choose b so that a has the desired magnitude, not the other way round.
I changed this yesterday, but it was reverted by 75.35.109.215 with no comment. Before I put it back, would any one like to comment? JoeKearney 21:17, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Normalised form 

message: I thought that was the entire number, ie-
6,765
instead of
6.765*10^3
DarkestMoonlight (talk) 16:15, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, you thought wrong, for example: http://www.gcse.com/maths/standard_form.htm - 81.138.169.201 (talk) 15:49, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Standard form? 

message: (Normalized) scientific notation is often called exponential notation...
AFAIK, "exponential notation" is generic, while "scientific notation" specifically refers to the one normalized so that the mantissa is in [1, 10), and "engineering notation" to the one normalized so that the mantissa is in [1, 1000) and the exponent is an integer multiple of three.
Is that correct? --Army1987 (talk) 13:02, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  You are correct. The confusion arises because number notation is for many people the only place where they have to deal with exponents in any form or shape.  2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D70:DD23:D4C0:C7E7 (talk) 09:42, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Isn't that backwards? 

message: The list of programming languages seems idiosyncratic and/or obsolete.  The top languages are:
C
C++
Java
PHP
Visual Basic
Python
according to 
I would add excel to that list.
Ccrrccrr (talk) 14:06, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The ones cited are those which many other later ones (including the ones that you cite) used as models for their notation, so are much more relevant than those which happen to be popular for a few years or decades now. mfc (talk) 17:10, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm glad to hear that it's a conscious choice, though I'm quite surprised.  The text doesn't present it as historical development..maybe I'll edit the text to say that.  The concern about "happen to be popular for a few years or decades now" doesn't seem like an issued to me, in that wikipedia gets updated much more frequently that that.Ccrrccrr (talk) 22:20, 7 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  programming languages 

message: I would personally be interested in seeing a History section for this page. It would be interesting to see where the idea of scientific notation originated, who invented it, and other things. If anyone is interested in researching/writing about that. atallcostsky talk  20:02, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion 

message: Shouldn't the article use the word "notation" instead of "form" in the case below?
"Normalized scientific form is the typical form of expression of large numbers for many fields [..]"
"Normalized scientific notation is the typical form of expression of large numbers for many fields [..]" Tommy (talk) 03:28, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "form" vs. "notation"? 

message: Shouldn't the article use this multiplication symbol "·" instead of this "×"? The reason I'm asking is because I believe the "×" symbol looks confusingly alike the "x" character. So in one example in this article, it would be a \cdot 10^b instead of a \times 10^b, thus avoiding confusion with ax10^b. Tommy (talk) 03:28, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No, to the typographically untrained eye the multiplication cross is quite different from the lower-case x, even in Arial or Helvetica. The dot tends to be used between quantities in the abstract, usually denoted by letters in maths. Between numbers, it should really be the cross. As you advance in maths, you learn to drop the dot as well (and that quantities should not have multiple-letter designations) except when the inner product is meant. As you advance even further in algebra and functional analysis, even the dot product dot tends to be dropped. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D70:DD23:D4C0:C7E7 (talk) 09:38, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "&times;" vs. "&middot;"? 

message: There are two types of normalized scientific notation forms, namely the "standard form" and the "alternative form". But this Wikipedia article does not mention them. Can someone please add info about that to the article? I found an explanation here: http://www.education.com/study-help/article/trigonometry-help-power-10-notation/ . The web page explains the differences from a mathematical perspective, but does not elaborate on why the alternative form exists, what it's benefits are (if any) and exactly what countries it is that uses it. Tommy (talk) 05:23, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Explanation of difference between "standard form" and "alternative form" of scientific notation, missing. 

message: Numbers in the article seem to use different conventions (spaces or commas) for grouping digits. These conventions do vary from country to country (although I notice that a comma is not used for a decimal point here).  Is there a specific convention in scientific notation?  If not, should digits in this article's example numbers be grouped at all?
What about digit grouping in the exponent?  In an E-notation exponent?
Casu Marzu (talk) 15:12, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Digit grouping? 

message: States - before and after 'x' and before 'e' yet in the examples, also uses it to seperate groups of 3 digits ?
Preroll (talk) 18:12, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of Spaces 

message: A few months ago,  was inserted for much of the display.  However, it is not compatible with either WP:MOSNUM or common notation, in that most commas as digit separators were changed to spaces of some sort.  Comments?  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 20:21, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I see very little change: in your revert there are still dominantly "spaces of some sort" anyway.  And WP:MOSNUM#Grouping of digits does suggest gaps for scientific articles ("This style is especially recommended for articles related to science, technology, engineering or mathematics."), so your revert has changed it from being consistent with the MoS to internally inconsistent.  If val is not consistent with the MoS, it should be changed so that it is.  —Quondum 20:56, 26 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Template "val" 

message: ... was accidentally anonymous (forgot that logged out) but done by MusJabłkowy. MusJabłkowy (talk) 11:57, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edition at 11:17 on 21 May 2017 

message: This is a comment to an update at the end of „E-notation” section. I replaced the phrase „but it is not encouraged in publications”, which causes people to give up with this notation (Janice Sexton from The Astronomical Journal wrote to me, that I am the first person asking them about E-notation.). 
The deleted  reference [3] to Edwards, John (2009), Submission Guidelines for Authors: HPS 2010 Midyear Proceedings (PDF), McLean, Virginia: Health Physics Society is still in the Internet (however John Edwards no longer works in Health Physics Society and his email given there is out of date) and Health Physics Society still does not accept E-notation: http://edmgr.ovid.com/hpj/accounts/ifauth.htm  (search for “Use power of 10”), retrieved on June 11, 2017 (perhaps this would be good to alter the reference, because it is now not smart to reference the text dated 2009, which applies to a conference in 2010). I have sent the question "Do you accept E-notation? If not, please explain, why not." to over 40 journals. Only 10 journals answered: 4 would accept E-notation, 2 would not (because of the style of the journal and the tradition), and 4 would accept it in manuscript and convert it to classical (superscript) scientific notation. If Wikipedia editors want it, I can forward these e-mails or paste them here (on the Talk page) – please e-mail to me at ; please don't rely on my Talk page.
MusJabłkowy (talk) 11:34, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Unfortunately, this is unsourced and original research (see WP:OR). We either need public statements of these (and other) journals or a "meta" source discussing the issue, see WP:RS. I have therefore reverted your change (also, becaused it introduced some POV). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:30, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

text: For privacy reasons I removed the email addresses in your comment above. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:34, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

text: The OP has an agenda here "which causes people to give up with this notation" and OP clearly feels people should not give up, they should push E notation with all their might. Is the agenda one that Wikipedia should countenance? For: E notation eliminates the awkwardness of superscripts and the need to always explicitly write that base number, which is 10 and could clearly be understood without having to be written out every time. Against: if E notation becomes the standard, the visual link with where it comes from will be lost, and a few generations hence it will be a little bit harder for students to grasp what is actually going on, there will be more full professors who make egregious errors because they do not really know what they are doing, and the public image of scientists as high priests of arcane nonsense will be a bit more cemented. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D70:DD23:D4C0:C7E7 (talk) 09:49, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edition on 27 November 2017 

message: I can't find a mention of it in the article.
Mathworld has this to say about it: "The special case of 0 does not have a unique representation in scientific notation, i.e., 0=0×10^0=0×10^1=...." at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ScientificNotation.html
Andopp (talk) 11:35, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: By convention 0 is written 0 in scientific notation. There is no way to write it with a normalized mantissa.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.111.154.89 (talk) 20:15, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  scientific notation was introduced to handle numbers that are awkward on the page in full form; zero is the diametrical opposite of a number that is too big too handle. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D70:DD23:D4C0:C7E7 (talk) 09:32, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  How is zero written in (normalized) scientific notation? 

message: Per gram of carbon is 1.0x 10^22 atoms how many atoms are there per micrograms of carbon Eman muzamil (talk) 20:05, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chemitry 

message: really cute but no-one ever does that 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D70:DD23:D4C0:C7E7 (talk) 09:21, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  2×10^0 

message: The article is currently somewhat inconsistent on this question.
The lede defines scientific notation as numbers of the form m × 10n.
The first section says that the alternative term 'exponential notation' can be used for "bases other than 10", rather strongly suggesting that 'scientific notation' is restricted to base 10.
But then the "Other bases" section says that "other bases can be used too", and explicitly refers to "base-2 scientific notation".
I honestly don't know whether it's correct to say things like "base-2 scientific notation".
(I suspect there's no definitive answer, and that usages differ.)
—scs (talk) 01:11, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone could obviously write a number like  with a base-5 significand and 5 raised to some integer exponent, if they wanted to, but such use is going to be extremely uncommon by comparison with the decimal version. I think it's fine to say that "scientific notation" is decimal. However, the intended meaning of a phrase like "base-2 scientific notation" is clear enough. –jacobolus (t) 20:00, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can "Scientific notation" use a base other than 10? 

message: Would like to add a Do Not Confuse to avoid conflation between E in scientific notation and e the numerical constant. MarsInSVG (talk) 15:03, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no place in this article where this confusion is possible.  Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:09, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Do Not Confuse with Euler's Number (e) 

message: Conspicuously absent from this article is any discussion of who first thought of doing this, when and in what circumstances the idea emerged and what it was first applied to. That's what I wanted to know when I looked up the term. Jalinker59 (talk) 13:37, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Apparently Archimedes invented the idea. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 16:01, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  How about some history? 

message: @Matthiaspaul just did a revert of some changes to the section  made by @Erudecorp a couple of months ago. I'm not entirely sold on the edited version, but the restored version, with the long miscellaneous bullet list of vaguely narrative sentences, is a mess. In my opinion it is unhelpful for this article to try to list every variant ever used in any obscure calculator or document for representing floating point decimal numbers. We should explain the purpose and context of a compressed calculator notation (something @Erudecorp was trying to do), and then describe the most influential few variants with clear paragraphs of prose (not a bullet list). The long tail of trivia should be chopped as out of scope and irrelevant. Cf. WP:INDISCRIMINATE. (And we should get rid of the little button symbols,  etc., in running prose. Plain text "EXP" or perhaps  is less distracting and conveys the same information.) –jacobolus (t) 19:37, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm afraid, I disagree with you here. I consider the chronological list of examples to be historically, encyclopedically, and educationally highly relevant for the article, as readers can thereby follow the interesting development of expression and notation over the decades and in the context of the available technology. I find this list fascinating to read and this kind of information is exactly the detail level I expect to find when turning to Wikipedia in order to learn more about a topic than what can be found elsewhere. While I have no principal objections in regard to turning this list into prose eventually, it would thereby become much longer and more difficult to parse. At the present state I consider it easier accessible as a bulleted list. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:33, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Many people find fascination in piles of trivia, but that doesn't (by itself) make them encyclopedic. Fascinating or not, this section is a confusing and largely illegible mess which must be cleaned up to meet basic Wikipedia standards for writing style. One useful approach might be to keep material which can be supported by "reliable" secondary sources, and drop the rest. –jacobolus (t) 20:38, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

text: Okay, I rewrote the section as paragraphs without taking out any of the details. It would be good to find secondary sources discussing this though. I feel like we're straying a bit toward original research in this section. –jacobolus (t) 23:12, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

text: @Matthiaspaul – Does that reformatting seem okay to you? I'm not trying to step on toes here / undermine anyone's hard work. (And sorry if my wording yesterday seemed sharp.) I tried to organize the paragraphs based on each separate notational variant, instead of the roughly chronological bullet points which I felt made for a confusing and disjointed narrative. But the organization and writing could probably still be improved. –jacobolus (t) 19:56, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  E notation section is a mess