I’m currently taking a pre-algebra math course. In the textbook, every single whole number greater than 999 is written without commas. For instance, 23,456,789 is written as 23456789. WTF? When I was in school (elementary, middle, high), it was an unpardonable sin to write a large number without the commas to help identify place value.
I looked through some of the higher level math books at the bookstore, and they all list all their large numbers without commas.
Why this trend?
BTW putting this in GQ because there has to be a factual answer to this.
It’s quicker to write, especially for obscenely large numbers.
It’s easy to make a mistake – most people begin writing numbers left to right, but commas are aligned right to left, this makes finding the first comma difficult.
Computers and calculators don’t use commas, since most people do basic arithmetic in more complex courses on computers and calculators, commas fell by the wayside since you don’t see them electronically.
Possibly, consideration for Europe. In a lot (all?) of European countries, “,” is used for decimal point, so 1,003 is either “one and three thousandths” or “one thousand three” depending on American or European reading, taking out the commas makes it unambiguous so that even if we usually use “.” we know that if we see “,” it’s definitely the same thing.
However, you do frequently see numbers broken up like “2 000 123”, with spaces rather than commas. I suspect the reason your book doesn’t is because the numbers aren’t as important as the concepts, so they don’t expect you to read and digest every number, but rather are just using random example numbers to illustrate an algorithm.
Since I’m not a textbook author or publisher, I can only guess, but I think this most likely. With people working (via computers and telephone) with other countries, getting used early on to a method that avoids disambiguation as much as possible is better than having misunderstandings later on.
Probably for the same reasons, many Europeans are getting used to writing numbers for computers with dots as decimal separator instead of the comma, because computers and calculators are manufactured to the US standard and thus use the dot for 2.5 (two and a half).
I wish people would get used to the the spacing method because it’s easier to read and easier on the eyes.
But it also depends on the field you’re in - in physics, chemistry and so on, a lot of the time you’re only using two decimals anyway (Because you start your calculations with accuracy of measurement) and the rest is powers of ten. At the end of the math, you round off to the same amount of decimals. So you never write out 1234567, instead it’s 1.23 x 10to7 or whatever. Maybe because it looks so unsightly, they want you to get used to the shorter abbreviation.*
Pet peeve: I wish newspapers would follow the scientific style and only use powers of ten for anything larger than 100 000s, to avoid all the mistranslations and confusions over AE billion/ trillion and European milliard/billion/ from spoken speech.
As long as we’re wishing, I wish the calculator implied radix notation was more widely used: Instead of 1.5×10⁶, you write 1.5E6 and save the visual noise inherent in things that never change (the ‘×10’ part). Plus, if the printing is a bit small already, you don’t have to strain your eyes reading an even smaller superscript and risk being off five (or fifty, or five hundred…) orders of magnitude if you mistake a 4 for a 9.
Are you sure there aren’t thin spaces separating the thousands? If so, then I agree that this is an unpardonable typographic sin, and the typesetter should be shot. (Possibly the publisher has tried to save money by hiring relatively unskilled typists to format the book with a word processor instead. Regrettably, this practice is becoming increasingly common.)
Something like that (though I dislike the E-notation) would also reign in embarrassing copy-and-paste errors where 10[sup]80[/sup] suddenly becomes 1080 – I recently read in an otherwise good article that there are about 1080 protons in the universe, which is off by just a bit.
Actually, that again is due to computers. In the European countries which use a “decimal comma”, it’s actually what’s called a coma alta (lit. high comma) in Spanish: that is, an apostrophe!
But, since “foreign” computer programmers were told just “a comma”, that’s what they used and that’s what we have to make do with. The “low comma” is accepted due to a technical problem, same as not putting tildes on caps is accepted when you use a mechanical typewriter.
I’ve used Made-in-Spain accounting programs, and those did have the proper coma alta.
No, the thousands separator is the period. Properly, in Spanish a billion (a Spanish billion, not one of those rinkydinky ones) should be written 1[sub]2[/sub]000.000[sub]1[/sub]000.000’00
I’d be careful about the size of the brush you’re using here if I were you.
I’m definitely European, went to school long before computers were commonly used (I started using computers for anything else than programming about halfway through my Uni years and wrote my MSc thesis on a 386 running WordPerfect under DOS), and I’ve never even heard about the high comma as a decimal point. The low comma, however, was our standard decimal comma when I started learning about fractions and decimals in primary school.
ETA, location: Scandinavia. And up here we still standardize on the low comma as a decimal point even if I personally prefer the point.
No, RATIONAL would be year / month / day, which sorts correctly without any special handling, provided that you use leading zeros on days and months < 10.
Nonsense, year-month-day is the ideal system. Day-month-year and month-day-year are both in common usage and can provide some ambiguity (is 10/12/2011 October 12th or December 10th?), but since no one uses year-day-month, there’s no chance of ambiguity with year-month-day. It has other benefits too, like making sorting chronologically easier and maintaining a most significant digit to least significant digit standard.
Also, on the comments of the x10^ vs. E, I tended to just use a little e instead, so I’d write 1.56e5. The lower case also provides a visual separation which I think makes it slightly easier to read.
For the OP, where are you? As others mentioned, with the various usage for thousand and decimal separators, I could see them not using anything for thousands to remove any chance of ambiguity between the two. I think the computer explanation also makes sense.
With subscript 1s and 2s? I’ve never seen that anywhere!
Day-month-year and month-day-year are both in common usage and can provide some ambiguity (is 10/12/2011 October 12th or December 10th?), but since no one uses year-day-month, there’s no chance of ambiguity with year-month-day. It has other benefits too, like making sorting chronologically easier and maintaining a most significant digit to least significant digit standard.