• Question: 1e+93 - 50,000

    Asked by whom534dote63 on 27 Oct 2025.
    • Photo: Amy Mason

      Amy Mason answered on 27 Oct 2025:

      I think the more interesting answer here is why is this problem hard?
      Calculators can only hold so many digits in their memory, so if you have one number that is very very big the calculator forgets what the end digits are, in order to be able to do anything with the number. So rather than knowing that 1e93 is 1 followed by 93 zeros, it knows it is 1 followed by, for example, 13 zeros and then 80 digits that it doesn’t have space to remember. So it can’t give you the exact answer, because it can’t remember the exact question. But it can give you the approximate answer = 1e93.

      This is called floating point error if you want to find out more about this.

    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 10 Dec 2025:

      You can get special calculators or computer software to display the real answer but 50,000 is so much smaller it barely changes the value from 1e+93 (the correct calculation would be 92 9’s followed by 50,000 e.g. 999…950000), so normal calculators would still just round it to the same value.

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