High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Scientific notation, also known as standard form or as exponential notation, is a way of writing numbers that accommodates values too large or small to be conveniently written in standard decimal notation. Scientific notation has a number of useful properties and is often favored by scientists, mathematicians and engineers, who work with such numbers. n many fields, scientific notation is normalized in this way, except during intermediate calculations or when an unnormalised form, such as engineering notation, is desired. (Normalized) scientific notation is often called exponential notation although the latter term is more general and also applies when a is not restricted to the range 1 to 10.