Exponent

Negative Exponents

• $5^3$ is equivalent to $1 \times 5 \times 5 \times 5$
• $5^{-3}$ is equivalent to $1 ÷ 5 ÷ 5 ÷ 5$
  • it could also be restated as $1 \over 5^3$

Mental Tricks

any number that is 1 followed by zero's (e.g. 100, 10,000 etc.) as an exponent can be figured out by multiplying the number of zeros by the exponential value and adding a 1 in front.

• ex. to figure out $100^3$, we take the number of zeros ($2$) and multiple it by the exponential value ($3$), which means the result has 6 zeros ($1,000,000$)

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At the core of exponentials is the idea that something is increasing at a fixed rate over a fixed period of time.

• ex. Covid-19 infections double every 5 days.

If you were to Fold a piece of paper 100 times, resulting sickness of the paper would be light years across

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Backlinks

• Logarithm