Thursday, December 1, 2022

Four New Metric Prefixes Adopted

First uses of prefixes in SI date back to definition of kilogram after the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Several more prefixes have gone into use be by the 1947th IUPAC's 14th International Conference of Chemistry, before being officially adopted for the first time in 1960.
The most recent prefixes adopted were ronna-, quetta-, ronto-, and quecto- in 2022, after a proposal from British metrologist Richard J. C. Brown. The large prefixes ronna- and quetta- were adopted in anticipation of needs from data science, and because unofficial prefixes that did not meet SI requirements were already circulating. The small prefixes were added as well even without such a driver in order to maintain symmetry. After these adoptions, all Latin letters have now been used for prefixes or units.

From here.

1 comment:

andrew said...

I note that the text isn't actually true because the abbreviation for micro is Greek and not Latin.