Question

we can display an exponent by typing 3x^2. With LaTeX formatting, we can type it as 3x^{2}. The LaTeX formatting will specially display 2 as an exponent, and the caret won’t appear in the output.

Answer 1

Notice that we can apply both a subscript and an exponent at the same time, and that we can use {} to tell LaTeX what to apply a subscript or exponent to (compare the examples on the bottom row).

Finally, notice that we put curly braces around exponents and subscripts with more than one character. You have to do so, or you'll end up with $2^234$ or $a^i+1_n-1$ when you really want $2^{234}$ or $a^{i+1}_{n-1}$.