The most common ways is to indicate orders of magnitude through multiplying by powers of 10. I expect you’re at least seen something like 6.022∗1023
show up in your texts. The important part for this discussion is 1023
, because it gives us an idea of just how large this value is. If we wrote it all out, it would be: 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000. You can do the same thing in the other direction, too. 10−28 Common value for certain types of physics, but a very, very small one.
Alternately, when dealing with probability, the function for determining the probability of series of independent events with the same odds is
where p is the probability of a certain outcome and n is the number of times the event occurs. For example, if we want to know what the odds of getting five heads in a row while flipping a coin we’re looking at 125 or 132
But the thing with powers of 10 is the most common I’ve seen, it even occasionally gets named Scientific Notation.
