what’s the physical meaning of mathematical operations?

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Let’s say you have a division. You’ve got 3/2, where 3 might be acres and 2 might be brothers so from there you could deduce that the division just means that the 3 acres of land will be distributed between two brothers. Summation and multiplication are quite straight forward, but what the hell does one do with multiplication and exponentiation? If I got 20 N-m of torque, wtf does the multiplication tells me there? If something follows a square root?

Please feel free to add any other operations to these. Thanks!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

For exponent you can think of it as area of a square or volume of a cube for the first couple.

If you have a square that’s 200 feet by 200 feet it’s area is 200×200 or 200^2 which is 40,000 feet.

If you have a cube that’s 200×200 and is 200 feet tall you get 200x200x200 or 200^3 which is 8,000,000 feet.

But, exponents in essence are simply a short hand way of denoting specific multiplication problems.

9x9x9x9x9x9x9x9x9 is the same as 9^9.

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