Scientific notation

Scientific notation is a way of writing numbers that are very large or very small. Normally, we write numbers in a form like this: 456,789. But with scientific notation, the same number would be written like this: 4.56789x10⁵. The number 4.56789 is called the coefficient, and the number 10⁵ is called the exponent. The exponent tells us how many places to move the decimal point. 10⁵ means to move the decimal point 5 places to the right, so 4.56789x10⁵ becomes 456,789.