From Paper to Pandemic
Have you ever imagined folding a sheet of paper ? If it were possible to do so, its thickness would exceed the distance from Earth to the Moon! This is because each fold doubles the thickness of the paper, this is what we call exponential growth.
Exponential growth occurs when something increases by a constant multiplier in each time interval. In early , the world experienced a real example of exponential growth through the spread of the COVID-19 virus. One infected person could transmit to two people, then four, eight, and so on.
Definition of Exponents
An exponent is a shorthand way to write repeated multiplication. Imagine you are calculating how many people are infected with a virus like COVID-19. At each transmission phase, the number of infected people will increase in an interesting pattern: