Scientific Notation Converter
Numbers to scientific notation and back, with e-notation and engineering form.
What scientific notation is
A number is written as a coefficient between 1 and 10 times a power of ten: 3,450,000 is 3.45 × 10⁶, and 0.000072 is 7.2 × 10⁻⁵. The exponent counts how many places the decimal point moved: positive for large numbers, negative for small ones.
E-notation and engineering notation
Calculators and programming languages write 3.45 × 10⁶ as 3.45e6. Engineering notation restricts the exponent to multiples of 3 so it lines up with SI prefixes: 34.5 × 10⁶ reads directly as 34.5 mega, and 4.7 × 10⁻³ as 4.7 milli.
Significant figures
Scientific notation makes precision explicit: 3.450 × 10⁶ promises four significant figures, while 3.45 × 10⁶ promises three. Trailing zeros in a plain 3,450,000 are ambiguous, which is exactly why measurements are reported in this form.