[gary]

Originally Posted by Rodstar

When I was at school, we learnt in Maths that the Australian and British convention was that 1 Billion was equal to 1 million millions, but that the American convention was that 1 Billion was 1000 millions. We were required to follow the Australian/British convention.

It seems over time that the American convention is winning out.

Hi Rod,

I think in most of the English speaking financial, engineering and scientific world,
one billion being equivalent to 10-to-the-ninth power has now pretty much won the day.

It all goes back to what the French called échelle courte and échelle longue,
which were two different numeric naming systems which in English were
known as the short scale and the long scale.

Apparently even the British officially abandoned the long scale in 1974.
See this Wikipedia article for additional detail -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

When I say "most of the English speaking world", one obvious exception is
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh & Nepal. I have been to all four of these countries
and they have this arguably quirky number naming system whereby 100,000 is
known as a "lakh" and 10,000,000 (i.e. 100 lakh) is known as a crore.
You will be reading the newspaper there and they will say something like
4 Crore 27 Lakh Rupees and you have to do mental gymnastics to work
out how much they are talking about.

Add to the confusion that they write 123,456,789 as 12,34,56,789.

It even gets more confusing in Germany where they use commas for
decimal points and decimal points as commas.

The net result is that I often a bit hesitant about what is meant when, for example, it is said that the Milky Way has 200 billion stars. Is that 200 million million stars, or just 200,000 million stars? Both are large figures, but the difference is still rather enormous (1000x).

Unless the article is British and older than about pre-1974, when they say a
billion they mean one times ten to the ninth power.

I would have thought that by now the academic scientific community would have determined a unified system, which I would expect to be the American system. Does anyone know or have an opinion on this issue?

In Scientific and Engineering circles, we tend to avoid it wherever possible
by using either scientific or engineering notation whereby everything is expressed
in terms of a powers of ten numerically. Engineers love to use powers of
ten where the exponent is a multiple of 3, so ten to the three, ten to the six, ten to
the ninth, etc. This is no coincidence as it works in with the preferred units
in the SI measurement system. In Electrical Engineering journals, if an article says
"a billion" they are referring to ten to the 9th but articles only tend to use the term when
referring to money and tend to revert to numerical engineering notation for most
things technical.

I would prefer to go with the Australian/British system, but I fear that the tide is strongly carrying us in the other direction!

Alas, the long scale system has long departed.

Best Regards

Gary