Scribe Post 9/7/10

William has already been the scribe before, so I am going to do the post for today instead.

Today in class we learned about section 1.3 which is about exponents. At the beginning of class, we went over the orders of operation also known as PEMDAS. PEMDAS stands for: parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, adding, and subtracting. Multiplication and Division are changeable, so in an equation you would just do the operations from left to right, same with Addition and Subtraction. Also today we learned about the properties of exponents.

Properties of Exponents:

a∧n=A power of a

a=the base

n= the exponent

a∧0=1

a∧-n=1/a∧n (take the reciprocal of the power)

Today we also learned about all of the different rules of exponents, these rules are really important to remember, so make sure you know them before the quiz!

Rules of Exponents:

a∧m a∧m= a∧m+n *you can do this only if the bases are the SAME

a∧m/a∧n= a∧m-n *again, you can only do this if the bases are the SAME

(a∧m)∧n= a∧mn (Multiply the exponents together)

(ab)∧m= a∧m b∧m (Distribute the exponent) ***CAUTION: you cannot do this with an equation such as: (a+b)∧m it is not the same thing

(a/b)∧m= a∧m/b∧m (Again, you distribute the exponent to everything inside of the parentheses)

Another thing that JoJo taught us today was that you always put variables in alphabetical order. One more rule that we learned was when you have a∧m/n it is equal to n√a∧m. A new thing that I learned today was that a square root symbol is called a radical, and the number inside of the radical is called the radacan. At the end of class we did a few examples and one big example at the end, at first the last example seemed really hard, but it made much more sense after JoJo showed us how to do it. It was a great day in math, and we learned a lot!

For the next scribe, I choose Jonathan.

**This symbol means raised to an exponent (∧), sorry I wasn't sure how to do it on the computer!