powers-of-ten

Scientific Notation: How It Works, Rules & Examples (2026)

Scientific Notation: How It Works, Rules & Examples (2026) Scientific notation writes a number as a coefficient between 1 and 10 multiplied by a power of 10, such as 4.5 × 10^-6 or 9.3 × 10^7. The coefficient (also called the mantissa) holds the significant digits, and the exponent records how many places the decimal point moved. It is the standard way scientists, engineers, and calculators handle numbers that are too large or too small to write out comfortably. Drop any value into the Scientific Notation Calculator(/math/scientific-notation-calculator) to see its coefficient, exponent, and standard form side by side. I still remember the moment scientific notation clicked for a student I was tutoring. She had written the mass of an electron as a decimal point followed by thirty zeros and then 911, and she had miscounted the zeros twice on the same page. When we rewrote it as 9.11 × 10^-31...