Monomial

In mathematics, in the context of polynomials, the word monomial can have one of two different meanings:

• The first is a product of powers of variables, or formally any value obtained by finitely many multiplications of a variable. If only a single variable is considered, this means that any monomial is either 1 or a power of, with a positive integer. If several variables are considered, say, then each can be given an exponent, so that any monomial is of the form with non-negative integers (taking note that any exponent 0 makes the corresponding factor equal to 1).
• The second meaning of monomial includes monomials in the first sense, but also allows multiplication by any nonzero constant, so that and are also considered to be monomials (the second example assuming polynomials in, over the complex numbers are considered).