# PGF Math: “An internal routine of the floating point unit near”

I am using this snippet:

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{pgfplots}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
xlabel=$x$,
ylabel={$f(x) = x^{-1}$}
]
\addplot {x^{-1}}; % this was previously: x^2
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}


That worked until I changed x^2 to x^{-1}. Now I am getting the following error (there are also lots of errors after it):

PGF Math: Sorry, an internal routine of the floating point unit near '2Y1.0e0]'. (in 'x^{-1}'). \end{frame}

Research:

I could not find many search results except these two questions from Tex SE:

Unfortunately, they seem to be unrelated since their problem is caused by a foreach construct which I don't even have in my code.

My system:

• MiKTeX-pdfTeX 2.9.4535 (1.40.13) (MiKTeX 2.9)
• PdfLaTeX
• Document class: Beamer
• The argument of \addplot should be x^(-1), not x^{-1}. Since the resulting plot is still ugly (a value near 0 is much too large), I'll let someone with more pgfplots knowledge write a proper answer. – Bruno Le Floch Nov 18 '13 at 21:56
• You need some xmin>0 or you will always get an error. – John Kormylo Nov 18 '13 at 22:05

As Bruno commented, pgfmath and pgfplots with fpu use parentheses for nested operations and when you provide braces, -1 passes directly to the computation bypassing the fpu conversion.

I would suggest using 1/x for less grey hair and powers of (1/x) avoiding baldness.

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.9}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
domain=0:1,
samples=100,
restrict y to domain=0:10,
xlabel=$x$,
ylabel={$f(x) = x^{-1}$}
]