Re: [Fhsst-authors] Re: [Fhsst-admin-priv] Re: Free High School Science Texts

[Sam Halliday]

Peter Hutnick wrote:
> Sam Halliday wrote:
> >Peter Hutnick wrote:
> >>Exponentiation is just a special case of multiplication.
> >actually... exponentiation was brought in as a way for people to be
> >able to add numbers without having to multiply them :-) (adding
> >exponents instead of multiplying the values themselves)
> Can't you add numbers without having to multiply them by . . . adding 
> them?  Maybe you mean "multiply" using only addition?

i worded it badly... exponentiation was brought in as a way of
simplifying multiplication... by reducing the problem of multiplying to
that of adding exponents

cheers,
Sam
-- 
Free High School Science Texts
  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fhsst
Sam's Homepages
  http://fommil.homeunix.org/~samuel
  http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~samuel

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