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I was doing the Writing and interpreting decimals exercise on Khan Academy and was asked the following question:
What is nine and three hundred two thousandths in numerical form?
I read it as "What is nine and three hundred... two thousandths", i.e. 9 and 300/2000 instead of "What is nine and three hundred two... thousandths", i.e. 9 and 302/1000.
Should there be a punctuation difference between the two?
Math has its own idioms that are a subset of "normal" English. I can see where there might be some confusion to someone unfamiliar with those idioms, but one would never read or write "300/2000" as "three hundred ... two thousandths". It would be "300 over 2000" or "300 out of 2000" or possibly reduced to "3 out of 20".
So I would argue it is mathematically unambiguous as written and additional punctuation is unwarranted.
Adding hyphens between the words as Kevin suggested in the comment ("three-hundred-two thousandths) might avoid some confusion, but is inconsistent with the typical grammar rules of hyphenating numbers.
:-)– msh210 Oct 20 '13 at 2:03