Exponents

A short explanation of what exponents are and how they work.
Consider the following:

In this case a represents the base number while b represents the exponent. A simple example would be 3². This means that the number 3 are multiplied with itself 2 times, i.e.

3² = 3 x 3.

Thus, the exponent indicates the number of times the base number has to be multiplied by itself.

Exponents have several operations that we can perform on them. They work as follows:

They also have another property, where if we let

then

This we call logarithms and it will be discussed in a future post.

Now you know the basics of exponents.