Intro to Power Functions

A monomial, also called power product, is a product of powers of variables with nonnegative integer exponents, or, in other words, a product of variables, possibly with repetitions. For example, Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle x^2yz^3=xxyzzz} is a monomial. The constant Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle 1} is a monomial, being equal to the empty rpdouct and to $x^{0}$ for any variable $x$. If only a single variable $x$ is considered, this means that a monomial is either $1$ or a power $x^{n}$ of $x$, with $n$ a positive integer. If several variables are considered, say, $x,y,z,$ then each can be given an exponent, so that any monomial is of the form $x^{a}y^{b}z^{c}$ with $a,b,c$ non-negative integers (taking note that any exponent $0$ makes the corresponding factor equal to Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle 1} ).

A power function, also called a monomial function is a function that can be represented in the form

Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle f(x) = kx^p where <math>k} and Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle p} are real numbers, and Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle k} is known as the coefficient.

Resources

• Intro to Power Functions and Polynomial Functions, Book Chapter
• Guided Notes