The article says that resisivity in normal metals follows a quadratic curve, but the article also says that it follows an exponential curve. Does anyone know which it right?
Yeah I think generally "sextic" is the highest you see before people stop doing that, and that one's somewhat uncommon I'd say. ("Quintic" is actually fairly common, contrary to what I said earlier, oops.) The fact that seventh-degree would be "septic" might be one reason stop with the words at that point!
Annoyingly, people often use "exponential" colloquially to mean anything faster than linear, but in fact lots of things are faster than linear.
From the other responses, it sounds like "none of the above". It's more like a "polynomial curve" that is only sometimes quadratic. Is "polynomial curve" a thing? "Power curve" / "power function"?