Imagine the situation: you walk into an interview, and they hit you with an unexpected question. Which number is bigger, they ask: 3.14 π , or π 3.14 ? The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Now, other than being annoyed that this is being asked for an entry-level job at a gas station, what’s the answer? Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to work it out by hand – or at all, actually. Thanks to a useful mathematical rule, you can pick the right answer almost immediately – no pen, paper, or pocket calculator necessary.

So, what’s the rule? It’s that, generally, exponentials beat multiplication. This is the area of math known as asymptotics, which deals with the behavior of functions as the numbers they act on shoot off to zer

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