Small Number
Within a set of positive numbers, a number is small if it is close to zero. A number is smaller if it is less than another number.
Within a set of positive and negative numbers there is ambiguity, because being closer to zero does not correspond to being less, but to being less in absolute value. Depending on context a negative number may be called "smaller" if it is closer to zero, or if it is more negative.
This article deals with positive numbers, and is also applicable to negative numbers by taking the absolute value.
Small numbers are numbers that are small compared with the numbers used in everyday life. Very small numbers often occur in fields such as chemistry, electronics and quantum physics.
Read more about Small Number: Fractions, Tiny Numbers in Science, Extremely Small Numbers, Infinitesimals
Famous quotes containing the words small and/or number:
“Here was a little of everything in a small compass to satisfy the wants and the ambition of the woods,... but there seemed to me, as usual, a preponderance of children’s toys,—dogs to bark, and cats to mew, and trumpets to blow, where natives there hardly are yet. As if a child born into the Maine woods, among the pine cones and cedar berries, could not do without such a sugar-man or skipping-jack as the young Rothschild has.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)