Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In mathematics, the logarithm of a number is the exponent by which another fixed value, the base, must be raised to produce that number. For example, the logarithm of 1000 to base 10 is 3, because 1000 is 10 to the 3 rd power: 1000 = 10 3 = 10 × 10 × 10. More generally, if x = b y, then y is the logarithm of x to base b, written log b x, so ...
log(9) = log(3 × 3) = log(3) + log(3) ~ .96; log(10) = 1 + log(1) = 1; The first step in approximating the common logarithm is to put the number given in scientific notation. For example, the number 45 in scientific notation is 4.5 × 10 1, but one will call it a × 10 b. Next, find the logarithm of a, which is between 1 and 10.
An important property of base-10 logarithms, which makes them so useful in calculations, is that the logarithm of numbers greater than 1 that differ by a factor of a power of 10 all have the same fractional part. The fractional part is known as the mantissa. [b] Thus, log tables need only show the fractional part. Tables of common logarithms ...
The single valued version of definitions and identities is always given first, followed by a separate section for the multiple valued versions. ln(r) is the standard natural logarithm of the real number r. Arg(z) is the principal value of the arg function; its value is restricted to (−π, π]. It can be computed using Arg(x + iy) = atan2(y, x).
Equally spaced values on a logarithmic scale have exponents that increment uniformly. Examples of equally spaced values are 10, 100, 1000, 10000, and 100000 (i.e., 10 1, 10 2, 10 3, 10 4, 10 5) and 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 (i.e., 2 1, 2 2, 2 3, 2 4, 2 5). Exponential growth curves are often depicted on a logarithmic scale graph.
For any number a in this list, one can compute log 10 a. For example, log 10 10000 = 4, and log 10 0.001 = −3. These are instances of the discrete logarithm problem. Other base-10 logarithms in the real numbers are not instances of the discrete logarithm problem, because they involve non-integer exponents.
[contradictory] For example, the number 4 000 000 has a logarithm (in base 10) of 6.602; its order of magnitude is 6. When truncating, a number of this order of magnitude is between 10 6 and 10 7 . In a similar example, with the phrase "seven-figure income", the order of magnitude is the number of figures minus one, so it is very easily ...
Mathematical tables are lists of numbers showing the results of a calculation with varying arguments.Trigonometric tables were used in ancient Greece and India for applications to astronomy and celestial navigation, and continued to be widely used until electronic calculators became cheap and plentiful in the 1970s, in order to simplify and drastically speed up computation.