This week in math I learned about scientific notation. Scientific notation is employed to calculate large numbers, it is often used in cases when a number contains many zeros as it makes the calculations less challenging and easier to fit on a piece of paper.  

 Example 1 :

An example of this would be 5 million. Since 5 million is written with 6 zeros, 5,000,000 it is very difficult to calculate as it is very easy to miss a zero and it takes up quite a bit of space on paper. For this reason, we have scientific notation, by using scientific notation we would move the decimal point to the left six times. By doing this we make the number more manageable, but by doing this we would have 6 zeros left, which would leave us with the equation . 

Example 2 :

Another more difficult example of this would be when we have a number more like this, 0.000,000,000,047. In this situation we would need to move the decimal 11 places to the right because the number is so small. That would leave us with the number 4.7. To make this number correct we would write our equation like this, . For this number we need to use negative decimals for the 10’s exponents because the original number is not bigger than 4.7, but rather smaller.