We saw in the rounding numbers section that it often makes sense to write long or complicated decimal values in condensed forms. In a similar vein, it would be nice to have a neater way to write really big or really small numbers without listing too many zeros in a row, but also without sacrificing too much information.

This is where scientific notation comes in.

We saw in the rounding numbers section that it often makes sense to write long or complicated decimal values in condensed forms. In a similar vein, it would be nice to have a neater way to write really big or really small numbers without listing too many zeros in a row, but also without sacrificing too much information.

This is where scientific notation comes in.