Powers Great and Small

Algebra I, Algebra II, Calculus, News Clips 1 Minute

I enjoyed this reflective piece from Math with Bad Drawings about determining whether a^b or b^a is larger. The final answer, involving the number e, was a complete surprise to me.

Short story: e is the unique number so that e^x > x^e for all positive x.

Powers Great and Small

  • Tagged

Published by John Quintanilla

I'm a Professor of Mathematics and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas. For eight years, I was co-director of Teach North Texas, UNT's program for preparing secondary teachers of mathematics and science.

Published

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.