Why would I spend time on this...

I stumbled across this:

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/21381/how-to-calculate-a-decimal-power-of-a-number

And I was really disappointed at the answers... do none of these people know basic math? Why can't they just answer on a level a 15 year old in math class could understand?

Calculate 2.14 to the power of 2.14 without any tricks or tables or anything the average kid wouldn't have... that should not be hard to answer for people pulling out power series and Newton's approximation... mostly crap I've never even heard of.

Here's the simple way...

And now you simply do the 5th root of 205.54002898923904 by hand (then the 5th root of that and the square root of that then * 4.5796).

I created a number-to-the-power-of-5 table using excel for numbers 1 to 1000 (a kid could do this by hand over a 1 month period for example, and for this problem you could stop at 290... and in general you could speed up by guessing) and then using that my final answer was 5.08.

The actual answer is 5.094...

So about a week's (or month's with no guessing) worth of child-level work would only get you about 1 decimal places of precision... but it's easy to understand how creating your own tables lets you get to an arbitrarily high level of precision.

An answer like this would help kids understand, oh, wow, yeah that's possible but I see why people are telling me to use approximations and tables... I see why people used slide rules and etc.

I can't chastise these absolute baboons in the link above, so like a complete psycho I'm posting it here.

And now... now I go to bed.

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