Post goes to a really roundabout way of finding whether the function is quadratic. The civilized way of finding whether an unknown function is quadratic is to

Post goes to a really roundabout way of finding whether the function is quadratic. The civilized way of finding whether an unknown function is quadratic is to do a log-log plot; first verifying that it's a straight line, and then finding the slope of the line. If it's not a straight line, it's not of the form f(x) = x^n. This works as as log(x^n) = n log x If we also plot the x-axis with a logarithm, any polynomial will just be a straight line with the slope of n.