#exponentiation — Public Fediverse posts

“In 1980, #Intel released the #Intel8087 #FloatingPoint coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic and square roots, the 8087 computed #transcendental functions including #tangent, #exponentiation, and #logarithms.

But it all depended on a 69-bit adder: "The arithmetic heart of the floating-point execution unit is centered about a #nanomachine comprised of the adder and its related #registers, #shifters and control circuitry," as the patent describes it”

#Silicon / #EE / #Computing <https://www.righto.com/2026/06/intel-8087-adder-reverse-engineered.html>

“In 1980, #Intel released the #Intel8087 #FloatingPoint coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic and square roots, the 8087 computed #transcendental functions including #tangent, #exponentiation, and #logarithms.

But it all depended on a 69-bit adder: "The arithmetic heart of the floating-point execution unit is centered about a #nanomachine comprised of the adder and its related #registers, #shifters and control circuitry," as the patent describes it”

#Silicon / #EE / #Computing <https://www.righto.com/2026/06/intel-8087-adder-reverse-engineered.html>

...we can put this perhaps more effectively by understanding that the general public does not really "get" the duo interplay of #Exponentiation and #Transmission, wherein a virus that lies within an arbitrary upper bound for #Mortality but still in the *same interval* a worst case #COVID19 variant might achieve- represents an #UnrecoverableError in the absence of effective #Vaccination rates and public #Compliance with protective measures

#functionalprogramming

Many people's vote for most #beautiful construct in #math is \[ e^{i\pi}+1=0. \]

Yeah, maybe. But I think a close contender (if you include the #CS realm) is \[ \lambda b.\lambda e.eb . \]

This serves as the complete #Church encoding of #exponentiation in #LambdaCalculus, driving home subtler points about #function #mapping and ordered pairs and the primacy of exponentiation over add/mult, both of which have uglier #LC representations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Arithmetic_in_lambda_calculus

#functionalprogramming

Many people's vote for most #beautiful construct in #math is \[ e^{i\pi}+1=0. \]

Yeah, maybe. But I think a close contender (if you include the #CS realm) is \[ \lambda b.\lambda e.eb . \]

This serves as the complete #Church encoding of #exponentiation in #LambdaCalculus, driving home subtler points about #function #mapping and ordered pairs and the primacy of exponentiation over add/mult, both of which have uglier #LC representations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Arithmetic_in_lambda_calculus

#math #education #school #arithmetic

At risk of pointing out the obvious, here's something that didn't occur to me in these plain terms until last week:

Everyone from little kids on up understands base-10 numbers to one degree or another, and yet decoding place-value #numbers requires using #addition, #multiplication, and #exponentiation in concert.