Scientific Notation

what's so scientific about it?

The name comes from the fact that the scientists starting using this notation since they had to deal with such large numbers frequently.

Its about representing big or long numbers using exponents. This can be done for any base systems.

Example - 350000 is written in this notation as 35x10⁴ or for example 0.000035 is written as 35x10⁻⁶

Exponent depends on just number of places the decimal point is shifted

Left shift - when decimal is shifted left, the exponent is positive. Right shift - when decimal is shifted right, the exponent is negative.

This one trick is enough to convert a number into scientific notation.

Normalization

Normalization is a standardization where we decide how many digits are allowed before the decimal point.

This is exactly also what the floating point representing standards such as IEE 748 use normalization for. Here, IEE748 says that there must be just one digit before decimal point. See floating point operations for more information.