3.12 Powers and Roots

First of all, a power and the appropriate root are inverses of each other. This means that we can use one to unravel the other.

For example, 3 to the power 2 (or 3 squared) is equal to 9. This means that 3 times 3 is 9. The power tells you how many times a number multiplies itself.

The inverse of this is that the square root of 9 is 3.

Written using symbols, we have

In the olden days, the square root was written like this:

but since the square root is the one most often used, we have become lazy and the 2 has been dropped.