Scientific notation converter

How it works

Scientific notation splits a number into a coefficient between 1 and 10 and a power of ten that says where the decimal point really belongs. Normalising means sliding the point until exactly one non-zero digit sits in front of it, then recording how far it travelled: moving left gives a positive exponent, moving right a negative one. The point of the convention is that every number gets exactly one representation, so two values can be compared at a glance by their exponents alone, and a number’s significant digits stay visible instead of being buried in a run of zeros.