How to Use Exponents in PowerShell (With Examples)

Often you may want to raise one number to the power of another number in PowerShell.

You can use the [Math]::Pow command to do so.

The following examples show how to use this command in practice.

Example 1: Use Exponents with One Number in PowerShell

Suppose that we would like to raise 5 to the power of 3 in PowerShell.

We should receive the following result: 5³ = 125

We can use the following syntax in PowerShell to perform this operation:

[Math]::Pow(5, 3)

The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:

Exponents in PowerShell

We can see that this returns 125, which is the correct result.

Suppose that we would like to raise the value of each number in an array to the power of 3 in PowerShell.

We can use the following syntax to do so :

$my_array = @(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
$my_array | % { [Math]::Pow($_, 3) }

The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:

PowerShell raise each value in array to an exponent

Notice that this returns an array that contains each of the original values raised to the power of 3.

For example, we can see:

Note: The % symbol is an alias for the ForEach-Object cmdlet in PowerShell, which is used to perform some task on each element of an array.