text: The Sand Reckoner In The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes proved the law of exponents, , necessary to manipulate powers of . He then used powers of  to estimate the number of grains of sand that can be contained in the universe.
  Islamic Golden Age
  Māl and kaʿbah ("square" and "cube")
  In the 9th century, the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi used the terms مَال (māl, "possessions", "property") for a square—the Muslims, "like most mathematicians of those and earlier times, thought of a squared number as a depiction of an area, especially of land, hence property"—and كَعْبَة (Kaʿbah, "cube") for a cube, which later Islamic mathematicians represented in mathematical notation as the letters mīm (m) and kāf (k), respectively, by the 15th century, as seen in the work of Abu'l-Hasan ibn Ali al-Qalasadi.
  15th–18th century
  Introducing exponents
  Nicolas Chuquet used a form of exponential notation in the 15th century, for example  to represent . This was later used by Henricus Grammateus and Michael Stifel in the 16th century. In the late 16th century, Jost Bürgi would use Roman numerals for exponents in a way similar to that of Chuquet, for example  for .
  "Exponent"; "square" and "cube"
  The word exponent was coined in 1544 by Michael Stifel. In the 16th century, Robert Recorde used the terms square, cube, zenzizenzic (fourth power), sursolid (fifth), zenzicube (sixth), second sursolid (seventh), and zenzizenzizenzic (eighth). Biquadrate has been used to refer to the fourth power as well.