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Currently I am working with significant digits of number. I know to find those digits if we have number with fixed decimal point, but, for example numbers $93487$ and $363042$ do not have point. So I am not sure how to find significant digits of number not expressed with fixed point notation. Also, my another question is how to approximate these numbers with numbers that have for example $4$ significant digits. Any help is appreciated.

Trevor
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    By convention, decimal point is at right end. For second question, leftmost 4 digits - rounding based on fifth digit. – herb steinberg Feb 06 '22 at 16:58
  • When working with significant digits, one should use scientific notation (which was invented for the purpose), not fixed point notation, which is ambiguous. In scientific notation, there is always only one digit to the left of the decimal point, and the number is multiplied by some power of $10$ to adjust for this. For example, your two values would be written as $9.3487 \times 10^4$ and $3.63042 \times 10^5$. You express significant digits by including exactly those in the number. For instance $0.02$ to three significant digits is $2.00 \times 10^{-2}$. The trailing zeros are significant. – Paul Sinclair Feb 07 '22 at 18:47

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