I’d like to second this comment, at least broadly. I’ve seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I’ve struggled to put the × 10 in the right place.
One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn’t an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.
I’d like to second this comment, at least broadly. I’ve seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I’ve struggled to put the
× 10in the right place.One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn’t an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.