Significant Figures
A significant figure is a digit in a number that adds to its precision. This includes all nonzero numbers, zeroes between significant digits, and zeroes indicated to be significant. Leading and trailing zeroes are not significant because they exist only to show the scale of the number. Therefore, 1,230,400 has five significant figures—1, 2, 3, 0, and 4; the two zeroes serve only as placeholders and add no precision to the original number.
When a number is converted into normalized scientific notation, it is scaled down to a number between 1 and 10. All of the significant digits remain, but all of the place holding zeroes are incorporated into the exponent. Following these rules, 1,230,400 becomes 1.2304 x 106.
Read more about this topic: Scientific Notation
Famous quotes containing the words significant and/or figures:
“Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate between them. When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the ones profession is a satire on the others, and eithers success would be the others failure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)