Question

What are the practical uses of scientific notation? Why is scientific notation so important in modern-day society?

Answer 1

Instead of writing 900,000,000,000 which is the number 900 billion

you can write 9 x 10^11 which is much faster and shorter

Answer 2

that's just one example where scientific notation is very useful

Answer 3

It shortens the length of long numbers for use in calculations (see Avogadro's number in chemistry), also it makes it much easier to read. In computer science, a float is a rational number ( a decimal) and although to my knowledge it makes no difference to which way the computer reads them, storing a float in scientific notation is probably easier on memory.