7. Power

The ** operator in Python is used to raise the number on the left to the power of the exponent of the right. That is, in the expression 5 ** 3, 5 is being raised to the 3rd power. In mathematics, we often see this expression rendered as 5³, and what is really going on is 5 is being multiplied by itself 3 times. In Python, we would get the same result of 125 by running either  5 ** 3 or 5 * 5 * 5.

Let's look at an example with variables:

s = 52.25
t = 7
print(s ** t)


Output:

1063173305051.292

Raising the float 52.25 to the power of 7 through the ** operator results in a large float value returned.