EPS SCI 15 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Piano Wire, Hydrophone, Bathymetry
2 Mar 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Lecture 6: scientific notation and tools used to probe the seafloor. An easy way of expressing very large numbers is to express them in powers of. Number expressed in scientific notation has 2 parts: the coefficient and the exponent. It is written in the form m x 10 n . Here, m is the coefficient, which is a real number that is at least 1. 0 and less than 10. 0. n is the exponent, which gives an indication of the scale of the number, aka how large it is. For example, 500 is written as 5 x 10 2 . The coefficient is 5, it can"t be 50 or 500 because it must be between 1. 0 and 10. 0. The exponent is 2 because you will have to multiply 5 by 10 2 , or 100, to get the number 500. So, the coefficient tells you the nonzero digits in the number and the exponent tells you how large the number is.
