Exponential Decay: Introduction

Exponential Decay

Introduction

In the last section, we looked at functions that model exponential growth. We saw that exponential functions describe a quantity that doubles, triples, quadruples, or gets multiplied by the same factor repeatedly. All the functions we looked at in the last section were exponentially increasing functions. They started small and then became large very quickly.

In this section, we are going to look at exponentially decreasing functions. An example of such a function is a quantity that gets decreased by one half each time. These functions are exponential decay functions.