Sticking to multiples of three does have a minor advantage of aligning itself with things that there are already number-words for; “thousand”, “million”, “billion” etc.
So for those who don’t work with the notation often, they might find it easier to recognise and mentally translate 20e9 as “20 billion”, rather than having to think through the implications of 2e10
Makes me wonder if there’s an equivalent notation for languages that use other number word intervals. Multiples of 4 would work better in Mandarin, for example.
Although i guess it’s more important that it aligns with SI prefixes?
Well, the nice thing about at least agreeing on using e as the notation means its easy to understand variants which prefer subsets of exponents. 500e8, 50e9, and 5e10 all are reasonably mutually intelligible. I think sticking to a subset of exponents does feel intuitive for talking about numbers frequently encountered in everyday life, but seems a little contrived when talking about large numbers. 4e977 seems to me like it isn’t much easier to understand when written as 40e976 or 400e975.
Sticking to multiples of three does have a minor advantage of aligning itself with things that there are already number-words for; “thousand”, “million”, “billion” etc.
So for those who don’t work with the notation often, they might find it easier to recognise and mentally translate 20e9 as “20 billion”, rather than having to think through the implications of 2e10
Yeah, that’s probably the rationale
Makes me wonder if there’s an equivalent notation for languages that use other number word intervals. Multiples of 4 would work better in Mandarin, for example.
Although i guess it’s more important that it aligns with SI prefixes?
Well, the nice thing about at least agreeing on using e as the notation means its easy to understand variants which prefer subsets of exponents. 500e8, 50e9, and 5e10 all are reasonably mutually intelligible. I think sticking to a subset of exponents does feel intuitive for talking about numbers frequently encountered in everyday life, but seems a little contrived when talking about large numbers. 4e977 seems to me like it isn’t much easier to understand when written as 40e976 or 400e975.