In mathematics, trailing zeros are a sequence of 0 in the decimal representation (or more generally, in any positional representation) of a number, after which no other digits follow.
Trailing zeros to the right of a decimal point, as in 12.340, don't affect the value of a number and may be omitted if all that is of interest is its numerical value. This is true even if the zeros recur infinitely. For example, in pharmacy, trailing zeros are omitted from dose values to prevent misreading. However, trailing zeros may be useful for indicating the number of significant figures, for example in a measurement. In such a context, "simplifying" a number by removing trailing zeros would be incorrect.
The number of trailing zeros in a non-zero base-b integer n equals the exponent of the highest power of b that divides n. For example, 14000 has three trailing zeros and is therefore divisible by 1000 = 103, but not by 104. This property is useful when looking for small factors in integer factorization. Some computer architectures have a count trailing zeros operation in their instruction set for efficiently determining the number of trailing zero bits in a machine word.