
In the 9th century, the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī used the terms مَال ( māl, "possessions", "property") for a square-the Muslims, "like most mathematicians of those and earlier times, thought of a squared number as a depiction of an area, especially of land, hence property" -and كَعْبَة ( kaʿbah, "cube") for a cube, which later Islamic mathematicians represented in mathematical notation as the letters mīm (m) and kāf (k), respectively, by the 15th century, as seen in the work of Abū al-Hasan ibn Alī al-Qalasādī.


Exponentiation by integer exponents can also be defined for a wide variety of algebraic structures, including matrices.Įxponentiation is used extensively in many fields, including economics, biology, chemistry, physics, and computer science, with applications such as compound interest, population growth, chemical reaction kinetics, wave behavior, and public-key cryptography.

The definition of exponentiation can be extended to allow any real or complex exponent. Term + term summand + summand addend + addend augend + addend } =.
