When we say raise a number to a power, we are talking about the exponent of a number. This is the amount of times a number is used in a multiplication. For example to raise 8 to the power of 2 we would write 8². This means that we would use 8 two times in a multiplication, or:

8² = 8 × 8 = 64

You might refer to 8² as 8 to the power 2, or 8 to the second power, or 8 squared.

Java has a Math method to calculate this for you, the pow() method and the general syntax (where x is the base and y is the exponent) is:

Math.pow(x,y)

Let’s see how we might use the pow() method in Java:

//Output 8 to the power of 2
System.out.println(Math.pow(8,2));
//Output 8 to the power of 3
System.out.println(Math.pow(8,3));
//Output 8 to the power of 4 as an integer
System.out.println((int)Math.pow(8,4));

The output should be 8², 8³ and 8⁴:

run:
64.0
512.0
4096
BUILD SUCCESSFUL (total time: 0 seconds)

Note that pow() will return a double value, so if you would like to remove the decimal point you can type cast the result to an integer.