Arithmetic and pre-algebra
Practice this topic
Exponents, radicals, and scientific notation
Understanding and solving exponents without algebra.
The world of exponents
Addition was nice. Multiplication was cooler. In the mood for a new operation that grows numbers even faster? Ever felt like expressing repeated multiplication with less writing? Ever wanted to describe how most things in the universe grow and shrink? Well, exponents are your answer!
This tutorial covers everything from basic exponents to negative and fractional ones. It assumes you remember your multiplication, negative numbers and fractions.
- Level 1 Exponents
- Understanding Exponents 2
- Understanding Exponents
- Positive and zero exponents
- Level 2 Exponents
- Negative Exponent Intuition
- Negative exponents
- Zero, Negative, and Fractional Exponents
- Level 3 exponents
- Evaluating exponential expressions
- Fractional exponents
- Negative fractional exponents
Radical radicals
A strong contender for coolest symbol in mathematics is the radical. What is it? How does it relate to exponents? How is the square root different than the cube root? How can I simplify, multiply and add these things?
This tutorial assumes you know the basics of exponents and exponent properties and takes you through the radical world for radicals (and gives you some good practice along the way)!
- Understanding Square Roots
- Square roots
- Approximating Square Roots
- Estimating square roots
- Finding Cube Roots
- Cube roots
- Simplifying radicals
- More Simplifying Radical Expressions
- Simplifying Radical Expressions1
- Simplifying Radical Expressions 2
- Simplifying Radical Expressions 3
- Square Roots and Real Numbers
- Simplifying radicals
- Multiplying radicals
- Adding and subtracting radicals
Exponent properties
Tired of hairy exponent expressions? Feel compelled to clean them up? Well, this tutorial might just give you the tools you need.
If you know a bit about exponents, you'll learn a ton more in this tutorial as you learn about the rules for simplifying exponents.
Scientific notation
Scientists and engineers often have to deal with super huge (like 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) and super small numbers (like 0.0000000000532) . How can they do this without tiring their hands out? How can they look at a number and understand how large or small it is without counting the digits? The answer is to use scientific notation.
If you come to this tutorial with a basic understanding of positive and negative exponents, it should leave you with a new appreciation for representing really huge and really small numbers!
- Scientific Notation (old)
- Scientific Notation Examples
- Scientific notation intuition
- Scientific Notation
- Scientific Notation I
- Scientific Notation 3 (new)
- Scientific Notation Example 2
- Scientific notation
- Scientific notation 3
- Multiplying in Scientific Notation
- Multiplying and dividing scientific notation
- Orders of magnitude