e notation

I was working on a toy problem recently which involved something called a “Giga” second. This is 10^9 seconds.

Easy enough, we can calculate that with Math.pow(10,9).

But what if I told you there was another way?

1e9

console.log(1e9 == Math.pow(10, 9))

true

So, what is this e notation?

[T]he letter E (or e) is often used to represent “times ten raised to the power of” (which would be written as ”× 10n”)

This is convenient!

But, depending on what precedes e, this might be confusing, or more specifically, it’s confusing if it’s 10e2 - that’s 1000, not 100, because it’s 10*10² or 10³.