This article is the first of a series exploring the fourth hyperoperation, tetration.

The
hyperoperations are a series of recursively defined operations such that

where is the th hyperoperation. The th hyperoperation reduces to a unary

operator . The first hyperoperation is addition, the second is multiplication, the third is
exponentiation, and the fourth is tetration. Tetration to a whole number is defined as

Tetration has an immediately obvious logarithm property, where

This gives us a method for taking the derivative of some functions involving tetration.
Consider the function .

Logarithmic differentiation also allows us to find the derivative of .

Logarithmic differentiation ceases to work for and above; the chain rule is a viable
method in that situation.
 Consider the graph of the function .

This function is continuous for all positive real numbers, this being true for all .
The derivative of this function tells us that there is a relative minimum at of
. What is more interesting is what happens when the argument is not positive.
The function is not differentiable anywhere and oscillates wildly.

The values of the function is defined on can be found by setting ,

where and are relatively prime. This gives

Now it is easily seen that is not defined for some rational number if it is
negative and is even.