- Richard Feynman -
Numbers - how to write them
From Juneday education
Background
We get quite a lot of questions from students regarding various prefixes like mega, giga, etc. What do they stand for? What symbol should we use?
It's rather easy to make mistakes with the symbols for the prefixes (and I'm sure you can find tons of such mistakes here on the wiki). But if you really want to know, we'll list a few here (and this time we'll be careful to make it right).
The SI system uses a lot of prefixes for unit quantities, and we'll present a few of them here:
| Name | Symbol | Base 10 | As a number | Short scale name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| peta | P | 1015 | 1 000 000 000 000 000 | quadrillion |
| tera | T | 1012 | 1 000 000 000 000 | trillion |
| giga | G | 109 | 1 000 000 000 | billion |
| mega | M | 106 | 1 000 000 | million |
| kilo | k | 103 | 1 000 | thousand |
| hecto | h | 102 | 100 | hundred |
| deca | da | 101 | 10 | ten |
What can go wrong if you write numbers the wrong way?
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