Scientific Notation Options

May 18th, 2024
tech, writing
When working with numbers that span many orders of magnitude it's very helpful to use some form of scientific notation. At its core, scientific notation expresses a number by breaking it down into a decimal ≥1 and <10 (the "significand" or "mantissa") and an integer representing the order of magnitude (the "exponent"). Traditionally this is written as:

3 × 104

While this communicates the necessary information, it has two main downsides:

  • It uses three constant characters ("× 10") to separate the significand and exponent.

  • It uses superscript, which doesn't work with some typesetting systems and adds awkwardly large line spacing at the best of times. And is generally lost on cut-and-paste.

Instead, I'm a big fan of e-notation, commonly used in programming and on calculators. This looks like:

3e4

This works everywhere, doesn't mess up your line spacing, and requires half as many characters as writing it the traditional way.

There are a bunch of other variants of e-notation, but I don't like any of them as much:

  • 3E4: a shorter separator would be easier to read.
  • 3e+4: the + is redundant.
  • 3⏨4: neat, but requires unicode and can't be pasted into widely-used programming languages and spreadsheet programs.

One downside of "e" notation is that it comes off as less formal than traditional scientific notation. But unless you need to be read as maximally formal I think it's just better all around.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

On Apologizing To Kids

Everyone is so weird about apologizing to children.

via Thing of Things August 25, 2025

Against the Teapot Hold in Contra Dancing

The teapot hold is the most dangerous common contra dancing figure, so I’ve been avoiding it. The teapot hold, sometimes called a "courtesy turn hold,” requires one dancer to connect with their hand behind their back. When I realized I could avoid put…

via Emma Azelborn August 25, 2025

Little Puppy

She's very little and she likes to do stuff with me. She also likes to bark around and run around and jump around. She also likes to go to places with me and that's all I have.

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts August 23, 2025

more     (via openring)