Basic Technical Mathematics, 11th Edition

11 Exponents and Radicals

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After completion of this chapter, the student should be able to:

• Use the laws of exponents to simplify expressions

• Convert radicals to fractional exponents and vice versa

• Perform mathematical operations with exponents and radicals

• Simplify expressions containing radicals

• Rationalize a denominator containing radicals

For use in later chapters, we now further develop the use of exponents and radicals.

In previous chapters, we have used only exponents that are integers, and by introducing exponents that are fractions we will show the relationship between exponents and radicals (for example, we will show that $\sqrt{x}\hspace{0.17em}=\hspace{0.17em}{x}^{\mathrm{1/2}}$). In more advanced math and in applications, it is more convenient to use fractional ...