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Modern exponential notation

In 1636, James Hume used in essence modern notation, when in L'algèbre de Viète he wrote A for A. Early in the 17th century, the first form of our modern exponential notation was introduced by René Descartes in his text titled La Géométrie; there, the notation is introduced in Book I.

I designate... aa, or a in multiplying a by itself; and a in multiplying it once more again by a, and thus to infinity.

Some mathematicians (such as Descartes) used exponents only for powers greater than two, preferring to represent squares as repeated multiplication. Thus they would write polynomials, for example, as ax + bxx + cx + d.