Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Jimmy Chang and I'm here to give you a brief introduction to exponents. Now exponents will be something that you'll be working with quite a bit as you progress through your math courses especially with algebra and calculus related courses. So here we go. Now with exponents what you'll want to think about is you've heard of superscripts and subscripts, now exponents are really going to be located in the superscripts of your terms. So for example you may have seen this before X2, now the 2 is going to be your exponent. Now exponents can be positive, negative, decimal, even square roots, things like that but other examples of exponents would be Y to the 4th, if you have Z, just Z that means the exponent is automatically assumed to be 1. Now like I said it doesn't have to be positive whole numbers all the time. You could have 3 to the -2. You'll learn later on that if you have negative exponents you'll be asked to move the exponent and the base down but you may also have other unusual types of exponents such as 4 to the 2.1 which you'll need a calculator to simplify or you could also have something unusual as X to the square root of 3 or even more interesting, Y to the Pi. You probably won't see these terms as much but this is just to let you know that you could put just about anything you want as exponents. In fact I have also seen instances where you have X to the X power. So, but with exponents you could do just about whatever you want with it and that's pretty much all we have. So I'm Jimmy Chang and that's a brief introduction to exponents.