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Re: Scientifc notation

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg41331] Re: [mg41312] Scientifc notation
  • From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
  • Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 03:57:07 -0400 (EDT)
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

The problem is that in Mathematica your two expressions  do not mean at 
all the same thing!. For example, in Mathematica 3000 is an exact 
integer while 3.00 10^3 is a floating point real--a very different 
thing.  So you can't really "convert" between them.
Having said that, you can almost achieve what you want as follows:


data = {1., 30.43, 10^-3, 3000};


ScientificForm/@SetPrecision[data,3]


                 1           -3           3
{1.00, 3.04 × 10 , 1.00 × 10  , 3.00 × 10 }

Note that in this way you  get 3.04 10^1 and not 3.043 10^1 as you 
wanted. To get that you need:

ScientificForm /@ SetPrecision[data, 4] but then you will get three 
digits after the decimal everywhere.

Another possible approach is to enter your data specifying the 
precision as follows:

data = {1`3, 30.43`4, 10^-3`3, 3000`3};


ScientificForm/@data

                  1           -3           3
{1.00, 3.043 × 10 , 1.00 × 10  , 3.00 × 10 }

This now looks right, but I strongly recommend that try to understand 
the meaning of all this.
"data" defined in this way consists of "arbitrary precision reals" 
(non-floating point) with low precision. They are again quite different 
entities form the ones you had originally. If you are only concerned 
with the way things look, this may be all you need, but if you are 
going to use these numbers for some further computations you had better 
consider carefully if they make sense in your situation. You may very 
well end up with quite different answers than you would have done with 
your original data.

Andrzej Kozlowski
Yokohama, Japan
http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~akoz/
http://platon.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/andrzej/


On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 09:13  pm, J. Guillermo Sanchez wrote:

>
> Dear friend,
> I would like obtein the output in scientific notation with a two
> decimals. Here is an example:
>
>
> data = {1.0, 30.43 10^-3, 3000}
>
> How convert to scientific notation
>
> {1.00 10^0, 3.043 10^1, 1.00 10^-3, 3.00 10^3}
>
>
>
>
>



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