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A comment on Why Are America’s Three Biggest Metros Shrinking?. Parent comment

Re:Why Are America’s Three Biggest Metros Shrinking? by i_am_proteus on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @04:35PM (#20933399)
There's (literally) exponentially more land available at greater distances from the urban center.

The area grows in proportion to radius squared.

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Re:Why Are America’s Three Biggest Metros Shrinking? by random_savv on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @04:42PM (#20933485)
That's not exponential, it's quadratic (still fast).
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Re:Why Are America’s Three Biggest Metros Shrinking? by big_chungus on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @05:00PM (#20933674)
Squaring is raising a number to the power of two, an exponential operation. Growing in proportion to a power of two could be reasonably described as a quadratic rate of growth.
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Re:Why Are America’s Three Biggest Metros Shrinking? by ajross on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @05:25PM (#20933948)
The pedantry obviously isn't relevant to the discussion, but just so you're clear why everyone is calling you wrong: "exponential growth" refers to a function of x that goes as C^x for some constant C, not one that goes as x^C. The latter is "polynomial" (of which "quadratic" is the term used when C is 2).
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Re:Why Are America’s Three Biggest Metros Shrinking? by panda88888 on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @06:45PM (#20934663)
Exponential is a^x. Square is polynomial, i.e. x^a.
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