What is mantissa? Please
1 Answer
The mantissa is the part of a number written in scientific notation that shows the "pattern" of the number (as opposed to the scale of the number).
Explanation:
When a regular number is written in scientific notation, it is written with two significant components:
The exponent is always the number of times the mantissa pattern needs to be multiplied by
For example the regular number
or, (less common these days) as
In either form the
In standard scientific notation, the mantissa is always written with one non-zero digit to the left of the decimal point.
So, for example, while
It should also be noted that for values with small magnitudes (absolute values less than 1), the exponent may be negative indicating the number of times the mantissa would need to be divided by
For example