For example, in pharmacy, trailing zeros are omitted from dose values to prevent misreading.
In such a context, "simplifying" a number by removing trailing zeros would be incorrect.
The number of trailing zeros in the decimal representation of n!, the factorial of a non-negative integer n, is simply the multiplicity of the prime factor 5 in n!.
This can be determined with this special case of de Polignac's formula:[1] where k must be chosen such that more precisely and
Defining the following recurrence relation holds: This can be used to simplify the computation of the terms of the summation, which can be stopped as soon as q i reaches zero.