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The English mathematician Henry Briggs visited Napier in 1615, and proposed a re-scaling of Napier's logarithms to form what is now known as the common or base-10 logarithms. Napier delegated to Briggs the computation of a revised table, and they later published, in 1617, Logarithmorum Chilias Prima ("The First Thousand Logarithms"), which gave ...
The 19 degree pages from Napier's 1614 table of logarithms of trigonometric functions Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio. The term Napierian logarithm or Naperian logarithm, named after John Napier, is often used to mean the natural logarithm. Napier did not introduce this natural logarithmic function, although it is named after him.
Napier also observes that logarithms of a geometric progression differ by a constant value at each stage, namely the logarithm of the multiplier. So if one knows the logarithm of the initial value of a geometric progression and of the multiplier, one can compute the logarithm of each member of the progression by repeated addition of the ...
John Napier of Merchiston (/ ˈ n eɪ p i ər / NAY-pee-ər; [1] Latinized as Ioannes Neper; 1 February 1550 – 4 April 1617), nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston. John Napier is best known as the discoverer of logarithms.
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 ...
Napier's formulation was awkward to work with, but the book fired Briggs' imagination – in his lectures at Gresham College he proposed the idea of base 10 logarithms in which the logarithm of 10 would be 1; and soon afterwards he wrote to the inventor on the subject. Briggs was active in many areas, and his advice in astronomy, surveying ...
According to a new study, it doesn't really make sense to calculate a dog's age the traditional way — by multiplying its "human year" age by seven. The actual formula, it turns out, might mean ...
The first device, which by then was already popularly used and known as Napier's bones, was a set of rods inscribed with the multiplication table. Napier coined the word rabdology (from Greek ῥάβδος [rhabdos], rod and λόγoς [logos] calculation or reckoning) to describe this technique. The rods were used to multiply, divide and even ...