Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The decimal part of a logarithm. In the logarithm 2.95424, the mantissa is 0.95424.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A supplementary treatise; a lesser work following one on the same subject.
  • noun The decimal part of a logarithm: so called as being additional to the characteristic or integral part.
  • noun [capitalized] In zoology, a genus of mollusks.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Math.) The decimal part of a logarithm, as distinguished from the integral part, or characteristic.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun obsolete A minor addition to a text.
  • noun mathematics The part of a common logarithm after the decimal point, the fractional part of a logarithm.
  • noun mathematics, computing, proscribed The significand; that part of a floating-point number or number in scientific notation that contains its significant digits.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the positive fractional part of the representation of a logarithm; in the expression log 643 = 2.808 the mantissa is .808

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin, makeweight, perhaps of Etruscan origin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin mantissa, of unknown origin (said by Festus to be a loanword from Etruscan).

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Examples

  • Even when the mantissa can be expressed with a single base-10 digit, like .4, it may not be the case in base 2.

    Exponential Growth in Physical Systems « Climate Audit 2007

  • -- The peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias who fought fatalism in his [Greek: Peri heimarmenês], at the beginning of the third century, and who violently attacked the charlatanism and cupidity of the astrologers in another book (_De anima mantissa_, p. 180, 14, Bruns), formulated the contradiction in the popular beliefs of his time (_ibid. _, p. 182, 18):

    The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism Franz Cumont

  • I decided to take the mantissa of the latitude and longitude points (everything to the right of the decimal point) and combine them together to get a unique id.

    O'Reilly News and Commentary 2010

  • When ColdFusion was generating the ID for the input, it was happily smashing the mantissa of the points together.

    O'Reilly News and Commentary 2010

  • I decided to take the mantissa of the latitude and longitude points (everything to the right of the decimal point) and combine them together to get a unique id.

    O'Reilly News and Commentary 2010

  • I decided to take the mantissa of the latitude and longitude points (everything to the right of the decimal point) and combine them together to get a unique id.

    O'Reilly News and Commentary 2010

  • When ColdFusion was generating the ID for the input, it was happily smashing the mantissa of the points together.

    O'Reilly News and Commentary John Barlow 2010

  • When ColdFusion was generating the ID for the input, it was happily smashing the mantissa of the points together.

    O'Reilly News and Commentary 2010

  • The frexp intrinsic function has been updated to return a mantissa in the range of

    Tweakers.net Mixed RSS Feed 2010

  • I decided to take the mantissa of the latitude and longitude points (everything to the right of the decimal point) and combine them together to get a unique id.

    O'Reilly News and Commentary John Barlow 2010

Comments

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  • the slurred response from my date last night, after we fooled around a bit and then i sent him home

    May 25, 2009

  • The significand (also mantissa or coefficient, sometimes also argument or fraction) is part of a number in scientific notation or a floating-point number, consisting of its significant digits. Depending on the interpretation of the exponent, the significand may represent an integer or a fraction. The word mantissa seems to have been introduced by Arthur Burks in 1946 writing for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, although this use of the word is discouraged by the IEEE floating-point standard committee as well as some professionals such as the creator of the standard, William Kahan."

    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Significand&oldid=850602451

    August 8, 2018