Columnwise power operation in matrix

Hi everyone (first post here)!

Say I have a vector x = [1;2;3].

I would like to construct a matrix X, where every column is the vector x raised to the power of the column number:

      1  1  1  
  X = 2  4  8
      3  9 27

With a for-loop, this is easily done:

for i=1:3
  X(:,i) = x.^i;
end

But could this be done with vector operation instead of using a for loop?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

bsxfun( @power, x, 1:3 )

[Alexander]

Wow, thank's very much, I appreciate it!

[Matt J]

But don't use this for fitting polynomials! Use POLYFIT instead.