A method of exhaustively verifying a property of a hardware design to implement a floating point power function. The method includes, formally verifying that the hardware design is recurrent over sets of β input exponents, wherein β is an integer that is a multiple of the reciprocal of the exponent of the power function; and for each recurrent input range of the hardware design, exhaustively simulating the hardware design over a simulation range to verify the property is true over the simulation range, wherein the simulation range comprises only β input exponents.