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From top to bottom: x 1/8, x 1/4, x 1/2, x 1, x 2, x 4, x 8. If x is a nonnegative real number, and n is a positive integer, / or denotes the unique nonnegative real n th root of x, that is, the unique nonnegative real number y such that =.
Squaring is the same as raising to the power 2, and is denoted by a superscript 2; for instance, the square of 3 may be written as 3 2, which is the number 9. In some cases when superscripts are not available, as for instance in programming languages or plain text files, the notations x^2 or x**2 may be used in place of x 2.
The limit, should it exist, is a positive real solution of the equation y = x y. Thus, x = y 1/y. The limit defining the infinite exponential of x does not exist when x > e 1/e because the maximum of y 1/y is e 1/e. The limit also fails to exist when 0 < x < e −e. This may be extended to complex numbers z with the definition:
y = x 3 for values of 1 ≤ x ≤ 25. In arithmetic and algebra, the cube of a number n is its third power, that is, the result of multiplying three instances of n together. The cube of a number n is denoted n 3, using a superscript 3, [a] for example 2 3 = 8. The cube operation can also be defined for any other mathematical expression, for ...
The sequence starts with a unary operation (the successor function with n = 0), and continues with the binary operations of addition (n = 1), multiplication (n = 2), exponentiation (n = 3), tetration (n = 4), pentation (n = 5), etc. Various notations have been used to represent hyperoperations.
For example, 9 is a square number, since it equals 3 2 and can be written as 3 × 3. The usual notation for the square of a number n is not the product n × n, but the equivalent exponentiation n 2, usually pronounced as "n squared". The name square number comes from the name of the shape.
A root of degree 2 is called a square root and a root of degree 3, a cube root. Roots of higher degree are referred by using ordinal numbers, as in fourth root, twentieth root, etc. The computation of an n th root is a root extraction. For example, 3 is a square root of 9, since 3 2 = 9, and −3 is also a square root of 9, since (−3) 2 = 9.
Fermat knew that a fourth power cannot be the sum of two other fourth powers (the n = 4 case of Fermat's Last Theorem; see Fermat's right triangle theorem). Euler conjectured that a fourth power cannot be written as the sum of three fourth powers, but 200 years later, in 1986, this was disproven by Elkies with: 20615673 4 = 18796760 4 ...