exponents

[Tanglefert]

can someone tell me the exponents of 480 please, thank you in advance

[Peter Pedant]

Come on TT - up late at night doing homework ? It must be in the chapter.

First factorise, whcih I can do in my head but never mind, 2 is factor and so is five,
2 x 5 x 48 and 48 is four tweves, so we get

2x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 x 3 or something

this is also 2 to the 6 x 5 to the one times 3 to the one (or whatever)

and der daah the exponent of 2 is 6 and of five is one and of three is one.

Not very clear Ihave to say....
and also ambiguous

take sixteen 16, that is four squared that is the exponenet of 4 is two and is also 2 to the 4,and the exponent of 2 is four - and is for (!) the same number....

[Tanglefert]

Nice, thank you. And no, it wasn't my homework but that of a friends son. Next time someone asks me 'were u any good at maths' i shall just drop everything and run away :)

[gen2]

Your question appears ambiguous to me and so I offer an alternative answer.

Numbers are often expressed in scientific notation (which also goes under other names such as 'floating point notation'). The number is expressed in 2 parts called the mantissa and the exponent.

In this case, the number 480 expressed in scientific notation is 4.8 E2
(where the mantissa is 4,2 and the exponent, E, is 2)

That means 480 = 4.8 times 10 to the power 2

[bernardo]

480 ^ 1 = 480
480 ^ 2 = 230,400
480 ^ 3 = 110,592,000
480 ^ 4 = 53,084,160,000
480 ^ 5 = 25,480,396,800,000
etc.

[Brownlow]

An exponent is the power to which a number is multiplied. It is usually signified by adding a small number (called a superscript, I think) to the side of the one to be multiplied, like in the 2 in the squared sign. So, 2� means 2 to the power of 3 - ie '2x2x2'; the exponent is 3.