Questions and Answers about the Course Content

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The objective of engineering notation is to convert any number \( c \) to one of the form \( m \times 10^{n} \), where \( m \) is a number from 1 to (just below) 1000, and \( n \) is an integer multiple of 3.

There are various ways of converting to Engineering notation. Your calculator may have a special key (an ENG button), but a method that works anywhere is this:

For numbers not in Scientific Notation and at least 1:
1. Start with the mantissa \( m \) equal to the original number, and the exponent \( n = 0 \). Group the digits into threes, starting from the right.
2. If \( m < 1000 \), skip to step 4. Otherwise, go to step 3.
3. Move the decimal point three places to the left in \( m \), and add 3 to \( n \). Go back to step 2.
4. You now have two numbers. One is the digits of the original number \( m \), and the other is \( n \).

For numbers not in Scientific Notation and less than 1:
1. Start with the mantissa \( m \) equal to the original number, and the exponent \( n = 0 \). Group the digits into threes, starting from the decimal point and going right.
2. If the last group has less than 3 digits, add trailing zeroes until it has 3 digits.
3. If \( m \geq 1 \), go to step 5. Otherwise, go to the next step.
4. Move the decimal point three places to the right in \( m \), and subtract 3 from \( n \). Go back to step 3.
5. You now have two numbers. One is the digits of the original number \( m \), and the other is \( n \).

You have your Engineering notation number as \( m \times 10^n \), where \( 1 \leq |m| < 1000 \) and \( n \) is a multiple of 3.

I will post some examples in the next post.

Thanks
Bart