Scientific Notation Converter
Enter any decimal number and read it back in scientific notation — a coefficient between 1 and 10 multiplied by a power of ten, with the mantissa and exponent shown separately.
Coefficient and exponent
The converter splits your number into a coefficient (mantissa) with an absolute value from 1 up to 10 and the matching power of ten.
Sign of the exponent
Numbers larger than 10 give a positive exponent; numbers smaller than 1 give a negative one. Zero is the special case 0 × 10⁰.
What is scientific notation?
A compact way to write very large or very small numbers
Scientific notation — also called standard form — writes a number as a coefficient between 1 and 10 multiplied by a power of ten. It keeps long numbers readable: instead of 0.00000000006674, you write 6.674 × 10⁻¹¹. Scientists, engineers, and calculators use it everywhere because it makes the scale of a value obvious at a glance.
Enter a number to see its coefficient (mantissa) and exponent, ready to copy into homework, lab reports, or a calculator.
Find the power of ten with the base-10 logarithm, then divide the number by that power to get the coefficient.
value = coefficient × 10^exponentTake 1234.56. The exponent is floor(log₁₀ 1234.56) = 3, so you divide by 10³ = 1000 to get a coefficient of 1.23456. The number is therefore 1.23456 × 10³. For a small number like 0.0042 the exponent is −3, because you must multiply 4.2 by 10⁻³ to recover the original — the decimal point moves three places the other way.
The coefficient tells you the significant digits, and the exponent tells you the scale. A positive exponent means a large number — an exponent of 6 multiplies the coefficient by a million, so 6.022 × 10²³ is a 24-digit number. A negative exponent means a small number: 10⁻³ is a thousandth, so 4.2 × 10⁻³ equals 0.0042. A quick sanity check is that the exponent equals the number of places the decimal point shifts to bring it just after the first non-zero digit — count left for big numbers (positive exponent) and right for small ones (negative exponent). When two numbers are both in scientific notation, you can compare their size by looking at the exponent first and only checking the coefficient if the exponents match.
Scientific notation is exact, but a couple of conventions are worth keeping in mind.
Normalised form and significant figures
This converter returns the normalised form, where the coefficient's absolute value sits between 1 and 10 (so 12 × 10³ is reported as 1.2 × 10⁴). The coefficient is rounded to ten decimal places to absorb floating-point noise, which can trim trailing digits of numbers that already have many significant figures. Engineering notation, where the exponent is always a multiple of three, is a related but different convention and is not used here.