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In mathematics, exponentiation, denoted b n, is an operation involving two numbers: the base, b, and the exponent or power, n. [1] When n is a positive integer, exponentiation corresponds to repeated multiplication of the base: that is, b n is the product of multiplying n bases: [1] = ⏟.
In decimal notation the nth power of ten is written as '1' followed by n zeroes. It can also be written as 10 n or as 1En in E notation. See order of magnitude and orders of magnitude (numbers) for named powers of ten. There are two conventions for naming positive powers of ten, beginning with 10 9, called the long and short scales. Where a ...
(This is the binary equivalent to shifting all decimal digits to the left or right when, respectively, multiplying or dividing by powers of ten.) The pattern of bits does not change, it just moves the number of places equal to the binary exponent (for instance, 3 places to the right when dividing by 8 = 2 3). On the other hand, when dividing by ...
Any real number can be written in the form m × 10 ^ n in many ways: for example, 350 can be written as 3.5 × 10 2 or 35 × 10 1 or 350 × 10 0. In normalized scientific notation (called "standard form" in the United Kingdom), the exponent n is chosen so that the absolute value of m remains at least one but less than ten ( 1 ≤ | m | < 10 ).
For a number written in scientific notation, this logarithmic rounding scale requires rounding up to the next power of ten when the multiplier is greater than the square root of ten (about 3.162). For example, the nearest order of magnitude for 1.7 × 10 8 is 8, whereas the nearest order of magnitude for 3.7 × 10 8 is 9.
A fixed-point representation of a fractional number is essentially an integer that is to be implicitly multiplied by a fixed scaling factor. For example, the value 1.23 can be stored in a variable as the integer value 1230 with implicit scaling factor of 1/1000 (meaning that the last 3 decimal digits are implicitly assumed to be a decimal fraction), and the value 1 230 000 can be represented ...
On currently available processors, a bit-wise shift instruction is usually (but not always) faster than a multiply instruction and can be used to multiply (shift left) and divide (shift right) by powers of two. Multiplication by a constant and division by a constant can be implemented using a sequence of shifts and adds or subtracts. For ...
Decimal numbers are not divided directly, the dividend and divisor are multiplied by a power of ten so that the division involves two whole numbers. Therefore, if one were dividing 12,7 by 0,4 (commas being used instead of decimal points), the dividend and divisor would first be changed to 127 and 4, and then the division would proceed as above.