I comletelly agree with this, it is very confusing API.

You should even be able to do this in Java with "import static"

Yep, you should define a static methods add, sub, pow etc with BigDecimal parameters and then use import static.

Something along

class BigDecimalMath { public static BigDecimal add(BigDecimal x1, BigDecimal x2) { return x1.add(x2); } }

Also JVM JIT would very likely inline such code, so you should not really worry about an added method call.