Take for instance the smartphone boom that started somewhere around 2008: At first, very few people had smartphones, but over the course of the next five years, the number of people who purchased them annually increased exponentially. Similarly, trends in sales and marketing tend to follow exponential patterns. Retirement funds, long-term investments, property ownership, and even credit card debt all rely on this compound interest equation to define how much money is made (or lost/owed) over a certain amount of time. In other words, interest accrues in such a way that each time it is compounded, the total interest increases exponentially.

Mostly, though, average people don't use exponents except when it comes to careers in finance, computer engineering and programming, science, and accounting.Įxponential growth in itself is a critically important aspect of not only the stock market world but also of biological functions, resource acquisition, electronic computations, and demographics research while exponential decay is commonly used in sound and lighting design, radioactive waste and other dangerous chemicals, and ecological research involving decreasing populations.Įxponents in Finances, Marketing, and SalesĮxponents are especially important in calculating compound interest because the amount of money that is earned and compounded depends on the exponent of time. In cases like these, businesses can apply the exponential growth or exponential decay formulas in order to better assess future outcomes.Įveryday Usage and Application of ExponentsĪlthough you don't often run across the need to multiply a number by itself a certain amount of times, there are many everyday exponents, especially in units of measurement like square and cubic feet and inches, which technically mean 'one foot multiplied by one foot.'Įxponents are also extremely useful in denoting extremely large or small quantities and measurements like nanometers, which is 10 -9 meters, which can also be written as a decimal point followed by eight zeros, then a one (.000000001). This is especially useful in business for calculating the amount that is produced or used over time by a company wherein the amount produced or consumed is always (or nearly always) the same from hour to hour, day to day, or year to year. The exponent, in mathematics, is always written in superscript to denote that it is the number of times the number it's attached to is multiplied by itself. To simplify this explanation, the basic format of an exponent and base can be written b n wherein n is the exponent or number of times that base is multiplied by itself and b is the base is the number being multiplied by itself. Identifying the exponent and its base is the prerequisite for simplifying expressions with exponents, but first, it's important to define the terms: an exponent is the number of times that a number is multiplied by itself and the base is the number that is being multiplied by itself in the amount expressed by the exponent.

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