Re: significant digits

In article
<7291483c-85ad-459d-8112-99634a048ecf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Mensanator <mensanator@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I got into a long argument this afternoon with a couple people who are
supposed to know this.

I said they were wrong, but on the slight chance that I'm wrong, I
thought I would solicit some opinions.

The number 0.0137 has how many significant digits? I say 3, the others
say 4.

I don't count ANY leading zeroes with no regard to the decimal point,
they count every digit after the decimal point.

I say that

1.37
0.137
0.0137
0.00137
0.000137

all have 3 significant digits.

I'm correct about this, aren't I?

Yes. Consider rewriting all numbers in scientific notation, a mantissa
followed by a power of 10, so that the first digit the mantissa of all
non-zero numbers is non-zero.

Then all digits of a non-zero mantissa are considered to be significant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significand
.

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