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Graphs of y = b x for various bases b: base 10, base e, base 2, base 1 / 2 . Each curve passes through the point (0, 1) because any nonzero number raised to the power of 0 is 1 . At x = 1 , the value of y equals the base because any number raised to the power of 1 is the number itself.
Exponentiation by squaring can be viewed as a suboptimal addition-chain exponentiation algorithm: it computes the exponent by an addition chain consisting of repeated exponent doublings (squarings) and/or incrementing exponents by one (multiplying by x) only.
The number n is called the exponent and the expression is known formally as exponentiation of b by n or the exponential of n with base b. It is more commonly expressed as "the nth power of b", "b to the nth power" or "b to the power n". For example, the fourth power of 10 is 10,000 because 10 4 = 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 = 10,000.
Logarithms and exponentials with the same base cancel each other. This is true because logarithms and exponentials are inverse operations—much like the same way multiplication and division are inverse operations, and addition and subtraction are inverse operations.
The exponential of a variable is denoted or , with the two notations used interchangeably. It is called exponential because its argument can be seen as an exponent to which a constant number e ≈ 2.718, the base, is raised. There are several other definitions of the exponential function, which are all equivalent ...
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]
For numbers with a base-2 exponent part of 0, i.e. numbers with an absolute value higher than or equal to 1 but lower than 2, an ULP is exactly 2 −23 or about 10 −7 in single precision, and exactly 2 −53 or about 10 −16 in double precision. The mandated behavior of IEEE-compliant hardware is that the result be within one-half of a ULP.
In mathematics and computer science, optimal addition-chain exponentiation is a method of exponentiation by a positive integer power that requires a minimal number of multiplications. Using the form of the shortest addition chain, with multiplication instead of addition, computes the desired exponent (instead of multiple) of the base.