History Main / MisplacedADecimalPoint

->'''Tony Stark:''' ''[after being trashed by an awakened Captain America]'' For the love of God, Banner! I thought you said we'd be lucky if he was strong enough to talk!
->'''Bruce Banner:''' Uh, so I guess I must have dropped a decimal point somewhere, Mr. Stark.

* ''ComicBook/TheUltimates'': Banner considered that Captain America would barely have enough strength to talk. He awakes in full force and trash the floor with everyone. Banner admits that must have misplaced a decimal point somewhere.

->'''Tony Stark:''' (''after being trashed by an awakened Captain America'') For the love of God, Banner! I thought you said we'd be lucky if he was strong enough to talk!

Subtrope of EEqualsMCHammer. Compare with CarryTheOne, the other arithmetic mistake common in fiction. See also {{Mismeasurement}}.

This comes as an analysis of complex systems and the inherent flaws of trying to develop an equation for anything and everything in the real world. It could also just be a humanizing flaw, where the math should have been perfect but they didn't account for all variables due to ego, naivete or arrogance.

If a work of fiction has a character who's good or supposedly good at mathematics, they will will inevitably screw something up somewhere down the line. When this happens, the project the group is working on comes crashing down, sometimes literally, and the mathematician will make a gesture of embarrassment and say, "I must have misplaced a decimal point."

This doesn't happen nearly as often in real life among mathematicians and scientists, since decimal notation is usually not the easiest way to write something. More common are radicals, fractions proper and improper, constants (such as pi or the natural base), and scientific notation.[[note]]Though technically, using the wrong exponent here is equivalent to misplacing the decimal point, sometimes over many orders of magnitude.[[/note]] It does, however, happen at times--not very often (as traditionally one keeps track of things in terms of integer multiples of the lowest common currency, such as integers of cents instead of decimals of dollars)--in finance. It was an occupational hazard for engineers and scientists in the days of slide rules -- see the Real Life section for details.

* In [[ComicBook/TheFlintstones ''The Flintstones'' (the 2016 comic book by]] [[Creator/DCComics DC Comics)]], local scientist [[Creator/CarlSagan Dr. Carl Sargon]] (Uh, NoCelebritiesWereHarmed thank you) calculates the trajectory of an asteroid with an abacus, concluding that it will collide with Earth in just a few days, destroying everything and killing everyone. [[spoiler: The calculations were wrong because a couple of moths had been breeding in the abacus, and Sargon took them for a bead.]]

[[folder:Film: Live-Action]]

[[folder:Film: Animated]]
* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Sing}}'', the prize for the talent show was intended to be $1000 (composed mostly of various junk stuffed in a chest), but due to some antics with a GlassEye, the secretary in charge of writing the ads ends up typing $100000, which attracts far more performers than usual and causes various other problems.
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[[folder:Live Action TV]]
* In ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000: TheUndead'', Tom Servo misses a single question on the tests given to the cast by the Brain Guys (which everyone else fails horrendously but Gypsy, and it's suggested via OverlyNarrowSuperlative that she'd have failed if they'd been able to decide on a control set) for this reason.
* Played with in ''Series/RedDwarf: [[SwirlyEnergyThingy White Hole]]'', Holly's IQ has been significantly increased (to 12,000) in exchange for [[ExplosiveOverclocking exponentially reducing her lifespan]]. When looking at her new lifespan, the screen displays 345 before she realizes "The decimal point, where's the decimal point?" She then discovers that she has 3.41 minutes left to live.
** Another episode featuring another hologram named [[DrillSergeantNasty Queeg]] [[spoiler:actually Holly pulling a prank on the crew]] insults Holly's IQ in this manner.

'''Queeg:''' [[DeadpanSnarker Six.]]
* In ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode "The Pyramid at the End of the World", a misplaced decimal point during a biochemical experiment results in a highly-voracious bacteria that threatens to wipe out all life on Earth within a year, if it gets out into the atmosphere. Why was it misplaced? Because one of the scientists accidentally broke her reading glasses, and her colleague had a bad hangover.

* In "The Romance Resonance" episode of ''Series/TheBigBangTheory'' Sheldon theorizes a new element, only to discover he has made a horrible mistake.
--> Sheldon: The table. It's in square centimeters. I read it as square meters. Do you know what that means?
--> Amy: That Americans can't handle the metric system?

** At the end of the telethon in ''Film/TheMuppets'', the titular characters have raised $9,999,999 - one dollar short of the $10 million they need to save their theater. As Richman gloats, Fozzie bangs his head against the money counter in despair. The display flickers, rolls, and resets... revealing that the decimal point wasn't displaying correctly, and that they actually raised only $99,999.99.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'', ''Mountain of Faith'' has a bug where Marisa Kirisame's lasers are ten times as powerful than they are supposed to be.

* ''Series/TheWire'': When Major Colvin is at COMSTAT presenting his official numbers showing a 14% drop in felonies in the Western District as a result of his Hamsterdam, Bill Rawls is skeptical of Colvin's numbers and says he's going to have them looked over to make sure Colvin didn't leave out a decimal point between the 1 and the 4.