Laws of Exponents

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The laws of exponents show the power of elementary algebra and lay the groundwork for logarithms. The laws are:
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Contributed by: George Beck (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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The laws of exponents apply to positive real numbers and
and non-negative integers
and
. With proper attention to exceptional cases they may be extended to all real numbers and with even more care to complex numbers.
The number is as indeterminate as
, because
, and as such is properly a part of the study of limits in calculus, but to simplify statements in algebra it is sometimes convenient to formally define
to be 1.
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