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When an exponent is a positive integer, that exponent indicates how many copies of the base are multiplied together. For example, 3 5 = 3 · 3 · 3 · 3 · 3 = 243. The base 3 appears 5 times in the multiplication, because the exponent is 5. Here, 243 is the 5th power of 3, or 3 raised to the 5th power.
When exponents were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were given precedence over both addition and multiplication and placed as a superscript to the right of their base. [2] Thus 3 + 5 2 = 28 and 3 × 5 2 = 75. These conventions exist to avoid notational ambiguity while allowing notation to remain brief. [4]
Because superscript exponents like 10 7 can be inconvenient to display or type, the letter "E" or "e" (for "exponent") is often used to represent "times ten raised to the power of", so that the notation m E n for a decimal significand m and integer exponent n means the same as m × 10 n.
Scientific notation is a way of writing numbers of very large and very small sizes compactly. A number written in scientific notation has a significand (sometime called a mantissa) multiplied by a power of ten. Sometimes written in the form: m × 10 n. Or more compactly as: 10 n. This is generally used to denote powers of 10.
A standardized way of writing very large numbers allows them to be easily sorted in increasing order, and one can get a good idea of how much larger a number is than another one. To compare numbers in scientific notation, say 5×10 4 and 2×10 5, compare the exponents first, in this case 5 > 4, so 2×10 5 > 5×10 4.
In this example, the number two is the base, and three is the exponent. [26] In general, the exponent (or superscript) indicates how many times the base appears in the expression, so that the expression = ⏟ = =
In expressions such as , the notation for exponentiation is usually to write the exponent as a superscript to the base number .But many environments — such as programming languages and plain-text e-mail — do not support superscript typesetting.
Visualization of powers of two from 1 to 1024 (2 0 to 2 10) as base-2 Dienes blocks. A power of two is a number of the form 2 n where n is an integer, that is, the result of exponentiation with number two as the base and integer n as the exponent.