Now I know this is one known fact that students just accept. Why is it that anything raised to the power of 0 is 1? We know that 2^{3}=2 \times 2 \times 2 = 8, meaning we take the 2 and multiply it three times. So wouldn’t 2^0 mean we multiply 2 zeroth times, and get back 2? So thats baffling.

This can be solved intuitively, like how we looked at 0! previously. We can look at b^a as the number of ways to arrange a set of a number with numbers from 1 to b numbers.

Consider 2^3. This means we arrange the set of 3 numbers where the numbers are just 1 and 2. So we have \{1, 1, 1 \}, \{1, 1, 2 \}, \{1, 2, 2 \}, \{2, 2, 2 \}, \{1, 2, 1 \}, \{2, 2, 1 \}, \{2, 1, 1 \}, \{2, 1, 2 \}

And we find the number of ways to be eight!

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