Math Problem

[Exquisitor]

Math Problem:

I've got a math problem I don't understand.

One to any power is one, so if you make your radius equal to one light year and want to raise it as an exponent, you always get one light year, but if you set the radius equal to ten of something, say ten tenths of a light year, and then raise it to a power of ten to see how big that is, you get 100 billion light years.

Come on, somebody show me how I can pull a few bills out of there.

 

[Lord Tammerlain]

Math Problem:

I've got a math problem I don't understand.

One to any power is one, so if you make your radius equal to one light year and want to raise it as an exponent, you always get one light year, but if you set the radius equal to ten of something, say ten tenths of a light year, and then raise it to a power of ten to see how big that is, you get 100 billion light years.

Come on, somebody show me how I can pull a few bills out of there.

Change the unit. Use km instead of light years.

 

[Noodlegawd]

Math Problem:

I've got a math problem I don't understand.

One to any power is one, so if you make your radius equal to one light year and want to raise it as an exponent, you always get one light year, but if you set the radius equal to ten of something, say ten tenths of a light year, and then raise it to a power of ten to see how big that is, you get 100 billion light years.

Come on, somebody show me how I can pull a few bills out of there.

That's not a math problem. Numbers, units, and mathematical functions are, in and of themselves, abstract. Distances are not.

 

[Scatty Kitty]

Change the unit. Use km instead of light years.

Um the OP is American. You have to use freedom miles.

It seems like the OP is saying that if you change it to 10/10 instead of 1 and then raise that to an exponent we get a different number. So 1^1=1. But (10^10)/10 is a different number. Am I understanding that right OP?

 

[AConcernedCitizen]

Math Problem:

I've got a math problem I don't understand.

One to any power is one, so if you make your radius equal to one light year and want to raise it as an exponent, you always get one light year, but if you set the radius equal to ten of something, say ten tenths of a light year, and then raise it to a power of ten to see how big that is, you get 100 billion light years.

Come on, somebody show me how I can pull a few bills out of there.

Actually, it would only be 10 billion tenths of a light year, which would be 1 billion light years.

If you don't understand what exponents are, they do much stranger things than that though. For example, 0^0=1.

This is because it represents an iteration of operations performed on a single unit.

So in the example, you start with a single unit of 1 tenth of a light year. The operation performed on that unit is to multiply it by 10, and the number of times you iterate through that operation is 10, to get 10 billion units of one tenth of a light year.

But if the unit you are operating on is a light-year, rather than a tenth of a light-year, then you are dividing the single lightyear by ten, and then multiplying the result by ten before performing no change to the resulting lightyear 10 times in a row.

If you divide a lightyear by ten, multiply the result by ten and then do nothing with the result, and then do nothing with the result again, it doesn't matter how many times you do nothing with the result. You will still end up with one lightyear after doing nothing with the result any number of times.

But if you start with 1 lightyear, and then multiply it by 0 no times at all, you will still have 1 lightyear rather than zero light-years because the number of times you multiplied your lightyear by 0 was no times at all. So you ultimately performed no operations to your lightyear, and are left with the single lightyear you started with.

That is why 0^0=1.

 

[GIJane]

They said there would be no math.