1. Determine the number of doubling periods:
Since the bacteria colony doubles every 4 hours and we want to know the number of bacteria after 24 hours, we divide the total number of hours (24) by the length of each doubling period (4). So the number of doubling periods is .
2. Use the exponential growth formula:
The formula for exponential growth in this case is , where:
is the final number of bacteria.
is the initial number of bacteria, which is here.
is the number of doubling periods, which we found to be .
3. Substitute the values into the formula: