Basic arithmetic terms in Japanese

[seanblue]

@seanblue

@Jonapedia

I think that for exponents, 累乗 or 指数 is probably more common. On YouTube, maths lessons in Japanese come up with those words in the title, whereas 冪 appears in lessons that are in Chinese.

At least one Wikipedia article used 冪, but the definition for that is 累乗に同じ. I’ll look into this a bit more, but using 累乗 might make sense.

@Jonapedia Okay, scratch that. 累乗, 冪, and 乗冪 are all more like “exponentiation”. Basically the name of the operation we’re generally talking about here. But I care specifically about the y in x^y. From a little more research, that seems to be the 指数 that you mentioned. I think that’s technically short for 冪指数 (or rather, 冪指数 has a narrower usage), but it could be that the latter isn’t used much. Either way, 指数 seems to be the one to go with here.