ELI5-What does the ‘e’ in large calculations mean, and why does it only appear in a calculator and not when one actually solves problems?

Question

ELI5-What does the ‘e’ in large calculations mean, and why does it only appear in a calculator and not when one actually solves problems?

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Answer 1

Something like 2e10?

That’s scientific notation. It’s basically a compressed way to write long numbers. You can think of the number after e as “how many zeroes am I adding to the end of this”. So 2e10 would be 20000000000. Sometimes you’ll see it with a decimal point(like 2.53e10). In that case, you would take the 53 as the first two zeroes and put down the other 8 at the end, so you would get 25300000000.