Monday, 15 August 2011

What is 0 to the 0 power?


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.

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