...Scientific Notation and Significant Digits (9/23/10) / Monday, September 27, 2010 @4:14pm

Today, we learned about Significant Digits. These digits are numbers that must be recognized in order for you to have the most accurate results in a measurement. However not all numbers are significant, the rules for significant numbers are listed below.
-Non- zero units are always significant.
-If the zero is a place keeper it is "generally" not significant.
*such as in 0.001 there is only one significant number (1) however in a case such as 0.100 there are three significant    numbers (1,0,0)
-any numbers to to the right of a decimal point are significant if they come after a non-zero number

When adding or subtracting round to the least precise number (this also applies to division and multiplication)
example: 7.4212-3.54=3.88 (since the least precise number is 3.54 having only three significant numbers the original answer being 3.8812 is brought down to 3.88) 


We also had a refresher on scientific notation. scientific notation is used for expressing very large numbers in the form of a smaller looking equation. We can also use them to express very large significant digits.