Scientific Notation Converter
Convert between standard decimal and scientific notation — instantly.
What is scientific notation?
Scientific notation expresses any number as a coefficient multiplied by a power of 10: a × 10^n, where 1 ≤ |a| < 10. For example, 0.000056 = 5.6 × 10⁻⁵ and 123,000,000 = 1.23 × 10⁸. It is used in science to conveniently represent very large or very small numbers without writing many leading or trailing zeros.
Frequently asked questions
What is E notation?
E notation (used by calculators and programming languages) writes 5.6E-5 instead of 5.6 × 10⁻⁵. The letter E stands for "exponent of 10." It is equivalent to scientific notation.
Why does converting back to decimal sometimes fail?
JavaScript's floating-point precision limits numbers to roughly 15–17 significant digits. Very large exponents (above ~308) exceed JavaScript's number range and return Infinity. For those cases, a big-number library would be required.
