Scientific notation is a distinct way of writing numbers that are too big or too small to be written in an accessible way. Numbers are expressed as a product of the power of 10 and a decimal that has just one digit to the left of the decimal point; for example, the scientific notation for 34,590 is $$3.459\times10^4,$$, and the scientific notation for 0.000004567 is 4.567×10-6.
Many electronic calculators will show these as 3.459E4 and $$4.567\times10^{-6}.$$.