Does this math meme make sense?

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[https://imgur.com/a/aiKWfXC](https://imgur.com/a/aiKWfXC)

I saw this meme posted on Facebook and I don’t understand. According to the comments, I am supposed to interpet this as 2\^18 = 262144, but why the square root? Also I thought that when it was a “power tower” of exponents like that, you worked from right to left, in which case it would be a ridiciously big number and certainly not be 262144?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You can mostly evaluate this pretty easily up until the end.

You’re right that you evaluate right to left (top to bottom) as such:

sqrt(2^6^2^1^**4^4** ) = sqrt(2^6^2^**1^256** ) = sqrt(2^6^**2^1** ) = sqrt(2^**6^2** ) = sqrt(**2^36** ), where I’ve bolded the part of the exponent I’m evaluating at each step for clarity.

Then you can either evaluate sqrt(2^36 ) = 262144 as is, or further simplify (recall sqrt(2) = 2^1/2 ) as: 2^36/2 = 2^18 = 262144

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