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Approximating a fraction by a fractional decimal number: 5 / 3 1.6667: 4 decimal places: Approximating a fractional decimal number by one with fewer digits 2.1784: 2.18 2 decimal places Approximating a decimal integer by an integer with more trailing zeros 23217: 23200: 3 significant figures Approximating a large decimal integer using ...
As a power of ten, the scaling factor is then indicated separately at the end of the number. For example, the orbital period of Jupiter's moon Io is 152,853.5047 seconds, a value that would be represented in standard-form scientific notation as 1.528535047 × 10 5 seconds. Floating-point representation is similar in concept to scientific notation.
There are two common rounding rules, round-by-chop and round-to-nearest. The IEEE standard uses round-to-nearest. Round-by-chop: The base-expansion of is truncated after the ()-th digit. This rounding rule is biased because it always moves the result toward zero. Round-to-nearest: () is set to the nearest floating-point number to . When there ...
To round a number to its nearest order of magnitude, one rounds its logarithm to the nearest integer. Thus 4 000 000, which has a logarithm (in base 10) of 6.602, has 7 as its nearest order of magnitude, because "nearest" implies rounding rather than truncation. For a number written in scientific notation, this logarithmic rounding scale ...
The commission rejected the seconds-pendulum definition of the metre the following year because the second of time was an arbitrary period equal to 1/86,400 day, rather than a decimal fraction of a natural unit. Instead, the metre would be defined as a decimal fraction of the length of the Paris Meridian between the equator and the North Pole.
Scientists often record time as decimal. For example, decimal days divide the day into 10 equal parts, and decimal years divide the year into 10 equal parts. Decimals are easier to plot than both (a) minutes and seconds, which uses the sexagesimal numbering system, (b) hours, months and days, which has irregular month lengths.
As most decimal values do not have a clean finite representation in binary they will suffer from 'round off' and 'cancellation' in tasks like the above. E.g. decimal 0.1 has the IEEE double representation 0 (1).1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1001 1010 × 2^(-4) ; when added to 140737488355328.0 (which is 2 +47 ) it will ...
10 times the length of the previous cosmological decade, with CD 1 beginning either 10 seconds or 10 years after the Big Bang, depending on the definition. eon: 10 9 yr: Also refers to an indefinite period of time, otherwise is 1 000 000 000 years. kalpa: 4.32 × 10 9 yr: Used in Hindu mythology. About 4 320 000 000 years. exasecond: 10 18 s ...