How to calculate Exponents in Python

Exponentiation is the operation in which a number is multiplied by itself a certain number of times.
Just like in the real-world, using exponents is useful in programming languages whenever you want to repeat multiplication.
In this post, we'll look at how to calculate the exponent of a number in Python.
Using the ** operator
The easiest way to calculate the exponent of a number is to use the **
operator.
This operator uses the left-hand side number to be the base and the right-hand side number to be the exponent.
For example, this is how to calculate the exponent of 2 to the power of 3:
print(2 ** 3)
8
This does the same thing as the following:
print(2 * 2 * 2)
8
Using the pow() function
You can alternatively use Python's math
module to calculate the exponent of a number.
This module exposes a function called pow()
which takes two arguments, the base and the exponent.
Simply import the math
module and then use the pow()
function to calculate an exponent:
import math
print(math.pow(2, 3))
8
You can also omit the math
module if you want to use the pow()
function directly.
print(pow(2, 3))
8
There is a slight difference between these two scenarios, however. The difference is that math.pow
will always return a float
but pow
will only return a float
if either number is already a float
.
Another thing to note is that math.pow
can result in an overflow error if the exponent is too large.
The error will look like this:
OverflowError: math range error
Conclusion
In this post, we looked at the best ways to calculate exponents in Python.
To summarize, you can either use the **
operator or import the math
module and use the pow()
function or math.pow()
to calculate exponents.
Hopefully, this has been helpful to you. Thanks for reading!
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