Am 19.05.2016 um 02:55 schrieb clipka:

> Neither the double asterisk (**) nor the caret (^) are mathematical
> symbols (well, at least not in this context); they are merely
> ASCII-conformant kludges to write mathematical formulae for which ASCII
> lacks proper necessary symbols, and different "schools" exist.

BTW, there _is_ a mathematical notation that looks pretty similar to the
caret "notation":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth's_up-arrow_notation

If you substitute the caret for the up-arrow, x^y would indeed denote "x
to the y-th power".

Given Knuth's connection to computer science, there may have well been
some influence between the use of the caret to denote exponentiation in
some computer languages and/or ASCII text, and Knuth's up-arrow
notation, though it is not clear to me which one was first.

Post a reply to this message