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Hi there, first question on this board, hope someone can help! ^^

I'm doing a project for my math class involving very large numbers, but they're NOT supposed to be written in scientific notation, but in standard form instead. I noticed though that any number after the 16th digit is instead replaced with a zero. Kind of an annoying auto feature, seeing how I don't want those extra numbers rounded off like that. Is there a way to keep the original number? For example, 2^64 is supposed to be 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. That's the number I want displayed. Instead I get 18,446,744,073,709,600,000.

Thank you very much!

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

Calc, and many other spreadsheets, perform calculations to about 15 significant digits of precision. So all Calc knows about 2^64 is that it is approximately 1.84467440737096 times 10^19. Calc does not know that it is exactly 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. If you ask Calc to display digits beyond …709 it will provide a 6 and then zeros because no more significant digits are available. If you want to work with large integers, you will need to use something other than a spreadsheet. A web search should locate some suitable software for you.

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Ah, I see. Well, thank you very much for the help ^^

commonman123 wrote:Ah, I see. Well, thank you very much for the help ^^

Perhaps Maple or Mathmatica can help but I believe that they are rather expensive. There probably is an OpenSource equivalent but I don't know a name.

Edit: Apparently there are relatively inexpensive Maple and Mathematica licences for students.