How Does Understanding Exponential Growth | Washington University Work?

Imagine you have a tiny seed that grows into a tree, and every day it makes more trees, and those new trees also make even more trees every day. That’s like exponential growth, and it's what Washington University is showing us in their explanation.

Let’s say your seed turns into one tree on Day 1. On Day 2, that tree makes another tree. Now you have two trees. On Day 3, each of those two trees makes a new tree, so now you have four trees! You can see how the number is doubling every day: 1, then 2, then 4, then 8, and it keeps going like that.

Think about this like a pizza party. If each person at the party brings one friend, and each of those friends also brings one more friend, and so on, the number of people at the party doesn’t just go up by a few. It explodes! Like going from 10 kids to 20, then 40, then 80, all in just a few days.

That’s how exponential growth works, it starts small, but soon it's everywhere!