PHP give us an operator for raising a number to the power of another number: the exponentiation operator (**).

For example, we can square a number by raising it to the power of 2:

echo 4 ** 2; // Prints: 16

We can also use this operator on floats and negative numbers:

echo 2.89 ** 3.2;  // Prints: 29.845104015297
echo 10 ** -1; // Prints: 0.1

For PHP to interpret this operator correctly it can’t have any spaces between the two * characters:

echo 2 * * 3; // Will result in an error

Let’s do some more math!