h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What a brilliant word "separatrix" is.

To me it conjures up an image of an evil female maths teacher who cuts off one part of you every time you get something wrong.

(Maybe I've been working to hard lately)

Anyway - here's a new maths jargon word for you to define:

mantissa

An insect that hides in a hollowed out logarithm and jumps out, biting the heads of innocent exponents?

Mantissa, the fractional portion of a number written with place value notation to the right of the separatrix.

I suppose words like that are susceptible to their 'expressive minded' and humorous misusages.

...so the separatrix had a mantissa hanging...

I once heard logarithm defined as 'a method of contraception used by Catholic lumberjacks'.

'a method of contraception used by Catholic lumberjacks'

ha! genius

So, the number of a digit's place, counting leftwards and making zero the first placenumber to the left of the separatrix, is the log of the number you multiply the digit by to get the number it stands for.

Example: 5000 = 5x10^3
3 is log 1000, viz the power to which the base (10) must be raised.

Makes sense to me.

But is this information of any conceivable use to anyone other than myself, who had the fun of working it out?

Maths is an art. It's done for fun