A clever way to estimate enormous numbers - Michael Mitchell
View the full lesson here: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/michael-mitchell-a-clever-way-to-estimate-enormous-numbers Have you ever tried to guess how many pieces of candy there are in a jar? Or...
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Whether you like it or not, we use numbers every day. Some numbers, such as the speed of sound, are small and easy to work with. Other numbers, such as the speed of light, are much larger and cumbersome to work with. We can use scientific notation to express these large numbers in a much more manageable format. So we can write 299,792,458 meters per second as 3.0 times 10 to the eighth meters per second. Correct scientific notation requires that the first term range in value so that it is greater than one but less than 10, and the second term represents the power of 10 or order of magnitude by which we multiply the first term. We can use the power of 10 as a tool in making quick estimations when we do not need or care for the exact value of a number. F...
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Whether you like it or not, we use numbers every day. Some numbers, such as the speed of sound, are small and easy to work with. Other numbers, such as the speed of light, are much larger and cumbersome to work with. We can use scientific notation to express these large numbers in a much more manageable format. So we can write 299,792,458 meters per second as 3.0 times 10 to the eighth meters per second. Correct scientific notation requires that the first term range in value so that it is greater than one but less than 10, and the second term represents the power of 10 or order of magnitude by which we multiply the first term. We can use the power of 10 as a tool in making quick estimations when we do not need or care for the exact value of a number. F...
