Math (Exponents and Modulus)

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, in this video I want to continue talking about math a little bit,
• 00:07 with a little bit more advanced math, not terribly advanced, but
• 00:09 a little bit more advanced than in the last video.
• 00:11 And we want to look at exponents and modulus.
• 00:14 And if you're not familiar with an exponent, that's, to the power of.
• 00:18 So, if you wanted 3 to the power of 3, which is 3 times 3 times 3, right?
• 00:23 Exponent, that's what that is.
• 00:25 Actually, we don't use a caret.
• 00:27 And many other programming languages, and in math, in general,
• 00:30 you'll use a caret to show an exponent.
• 00:32 Not the case with C#, so, we'll talk about that.
• 00:36 But we'll get into that in a second.
• 00:38 A modulus is a remainder.
• 00:39 So, let's say we had 14 divided by 5.
• 00:44 Well, 5 goes into 14, 2 times,
• 00:46 2 times 5 is 10 with 4 leftover, for remainder, right?
• 00:50 Modulus returns that remainder.
• 00:53 So, that's very handy for all kinds of things.
• 00:55 Those are the two things we're going to talk about in this video.
• 00:57 So, let's go again int x = 3 and
• 01:02 int y, I don't know, = 3, again.
• 01:06 I don't want to go crazy on the exponents.
• 01:08 But, normally, for exponents, in a lot of programming languages you would go x and
• 01:14 then double multiplication signs and then y.
• 01:18 Now, if we save this and run it here, this is not going to work.
• 01:21 See, we're going to get errors, and it doesn't return anything.
• 01:25 So, C# is a little bit strange, as far as programing language goes.
• 01:28 It doesn't have an exponent operator, which is very weird, its just strange.
• 01:33 But the .net that C# is build on top of, has a function called a math power.
• 01:37 So, that's what we can use.
• 01:39 And to do that, we just call Math.Pow, right?
• 01:45 And then inside of here, we pass the two things that we want to do.
• 01:49 So, if we wanted x to the power of y, we would do it like that.
• 01:53 So, 3 times 3 times 3, that should be 27.
• 01:55 If we save this and run it, we get an error.
• 01:58 We need an extra bracket there.
• 02:00 There we go.
• 02:02 Now, if we save this and run it, we get 27, right?
• 02:06 So, kind of weird, let me just put this Math.Pow and say first and second.
• 02:12 So, its first would be 3 raised to the power of the second thing,
• 02:18 which here is also 3.
• 02:19 So, if we change this to 4, this would be 3 raised to the power of 4, right?
• 02:24 So, if we run this, 27 times 3 is what?
• 02:28 81, so, there you go.
• 02:30 So, that's exponents.
• 02:32 Pretty easy, modulus is just this % sign, which is a little weird, but
• 02:37 that's common in most programming languages.
• 02:40 Let's take our previous example 14 divided by 5.
• 02:43 So, here, let's go x modulus y.
• 02:48 So like I said, 14 divided by 5 is 2, 2 times 5 is 10.
• 02:53 With 4 leftover, this should return 4, whatever that remainder is,
• 02:57 in this case 4.
• 02:57 So, if we run this, we get, sure enough, 4, and that's what we expect.
• 03:04 A modulus, I find,
• 03:05 a lot of beginner coding students have a hard time wrapping their brain around.
• 03:09 Why would we ever need a remainder?
• 03:11 Believe me, you're going to need to find remainders for
• 03:13 all kinds of different things.
• 03:15 And we might have an example of that later on.
• 03:16 But, very powerful, very easy to use modulus.
• 03:19 And the exponents, it's Math.Pow, which is a little weird, but works just fine.
• 03:24 Why do you need an operator when you could just call the Math.Pow function?
• 03:27 So, that's how they set that up, and that's all there is to it.
• 03:31 So, that's all for modulus and exponents.
• 03:32 In the next video, we'll look at math order of operations.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.