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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

If I'm reading Wikipedia correctly, the formula is quadratic for some metals, and cubic or quintuplic(?) for others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...

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Typically, the behavior of any given metal is a mix of mechanisms so the measured behavior is fit to a curve where you fit n. So for metals the exponent is typically a decimal between 2 and 5.

Thanks, I appreciate the explanation. :)

You would normally just say "5th degree" or "5th power".

But the specific word they were looking for is "quintic". (And the corresponding word for 4th-degree, in case anyone is curious, is "quartic"; one sometimes sees "biquadratic", which unfortunately is also sometimes used to describe a particular subset of quartics.)

Oh right, silly me. Wow, my own vocabulary deserted me there, huh?

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!

I'm pretty sure that more than half the times I've seen "quintic" are in one single context: talking about the fact that while you can solve polynomial equations of degree 1-4 by doing arithmetic and taking n'th roots, this stops being possible once you get as far as quintic equations. (The "insolubility of the quintic".)

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