Well, fast forward to the present day and guess what? That same guy is still out there, but now he’s got an entire language dedicated to helping him calculate really big numbers without having to do any actual math! It’s called recursive arrow notation (or RAN for short), and it looks like this:

10 3

That might not look like much at first glance, but trust me when I say that this is some serious math business. In fact, if you were to try and calculate the value of that expression using traditional methods (like a calculator or a spreadsheet), it would take your computer several lifetimes just to finish!

But with RAN, all you have to do is follow these simple steps:
1) Start by writing down the number 10. This will be our base case for this particular calculation.
2) Next, draw two arrows pointing upwards and write “” in between them. This tells us that we need to raise the previous result (which was 10) to the power of whatever comes next.
3) After the second arrow, write down another number (in this case, it’s 3). This will be our exponent for the current calculation.
4) Finally, repeat steps 2 and 3 as many times as necessary until you reach your desired level of recursion. In other words, if we wanted to calculate 10 5 using RAN, we would first write down:

10 3

Then, for the second calculation (which is inside the parentheses), we would do this:

(
10 2
)

And so on and so forth until we’ve reached our final answer. It might sound complicated at first, but trust me when I say that once you get the hang of it, RAN is actually pretty easy to use! In fact, some people even clgoal that it can help them solve complex math problems faster than traditional methods (although I personally haven’t tried it myself).

So if you ever find yourself struggling with a particularly large number or calculation, why not give recursive arrow notation a try? Who knows maybe it will become your new go-to method for solving all kinds of mathematical puzzles!