Why am I getting a “; expected” error?

You need to pass two int parameters into intPow():

public static void main(String args[])
    {
        int a = 2;
        int b = 5;
        intPow(a, b); //32
    }

Furthermore, you should probably return an int from intPow() so you can play with it later:

public static int intPow(int a, int b) { 
    return Math.pow(a, b);
}

Then in main():

public static void main(String args[])
    {
        int a = 2;
        int b = 5;
        int power = intPow(a, b); //32
        System.out.println(power);
    }