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What is 0 to the 0 power? This answer is adapted from an entry in the sci.math Frequently Asked Questions file, which is Copyright (c) 1994 Hans de Vreught (hdev@cp.tn.tudelft.nl). According to some Calculus textbooks, 0^0 is an "indeterminate form." What mathematicians mean by "indeterminate form" is that in some cases we think about it as having one value, and in other cases we think about it as having another. When evaluating a limit of the form 0^0, you need to know that limits of that form are "indeterminate forms," and that you need to use a special technique such as L'Hopital's rule to evaluate them. For instance, when evaluating the limit Sin[x]^x (which is 1 as x goes to 0), we say it is equal to x^x (since Sin[x] and x go to 0 at the same rate, i.e. limit as x->0 of Sin[x]/x is 1). Then we can see from the graph of x^x that its limit is 1. Other than the times when we want it to be indeterminate, 0^0 = 1 seems to be the most useful choice for 0^0 . This convention allows us to extend definitions in different areas of mathematics that would otherwise require treating 0 as a special case. Notice that 0^0 is a discontinuity of the function f(x,y) = x^y, because no matter what number you assign to 0^0, you can't make x^y continuous at (0,0), since the limit along the line x=0 is 0, and the limit along the line y=0 is 1. This means that depending on the context where 0^0 occurs, you might wish to substitute it with 1, indeterminate or undefined/nonexistent. Some people feel that giving a value to a function with an essential discontinuity at a point, such as x^y at (0,0), is an inelegant patch and should not be done. Others point out correctly that in mathematics, usefulness and consistency are very important, and that under these parameters 0^0 = 1 is the natural choice. The following is a list of reasons why 0^0 should be 1. Rotando & Korn show that if f and g are analytic functions and f > 0, then f(x)^g(x) approaches 1 as x approaches 0 from the right. From Concrete Mathematics p.162 (R. Graham, D. Knuth, O. Patashnik): Some textbooks leave the quantity 0^0 undefined, because the functions 0^x and x^0 have different limiting values when x decreases to 0. But this is a mistake. We must define x^0=1 for all x , if the binomial theorem is to be valid when x=0 , y=0 , and/or x=-y . The theorem is too important to be arbitrarily restricted! By contrast, the function 0^x is quite unimportant. Published by Addison-Wesley, 2nd printing Dec, 1988. As a rule of thumb, one can say that 0^0 = 1 , but 0.0^(0.0) is undefined, meaning that when approaching from a different direction there is no clearly predetermined value to assign to 0.0^(0.0) ; but Kahan has argued that 0.0^(0.0) should be 1, because if f(x), g(x) → 0 as x approaches some limit, and f(x) and g(x) are analytic functions, then f(x)^g(x) → 1 . The discussion of 0^0 is very old. Euler argues for 0^0 = 1 since a^0 = 1 for a not equal to 0 . The controversy raged throughout the nineteenth century, but was mainly conducted in the pages of the lesser journals: Grunert's Archiv and Schlomilch's Zeitshrift. Consensus has recently been built around setting the value of 0^0 = 1 . References Knuth. Two notes on notation. (AMM 99 no. 5 (May 1992), 403-422). H. E. Vaughan. The expression ' 0^0 '. Mathematics Teacher 63 (1970), pp.111-112. Louis M. Rotando and Henry Korn. The Indeterminate Form 0^0 . Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 1977), pp. 41-42. L. J. Paige. A note on indeterminate forms. American Mathematical Monthly, 61 (1954), 189-190; reprinted in the Mathematical Association of America's 1969 volume, Selected Papers on Calculus, pp. 210-211. Baxley & Hayashi. A note on indeterminate forms. American Mathematical Monthly, 85 (1978), pp. 484-486. Robert S. Fouch. On the definability of zero to the power zero. School Science and Mathematics 53, No. 9 (December 1953), pp. 693-696. From the Dr. Math archives:     Why are operations of zero so strange? Why do we say 1/0 is undefined? Can't you call 1/0 infinity and -1/0 negative infinity? Why not? What is 0 * (1/0)? What is the quantity 0^0?

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