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Binary logarithms are also used in computer science, where the binary system is ubiquitous; in music theory, where a pitch ratio of two (the octave) is ubiquitous and the number of cents between any two pitches is a scaled version of the binary logarithm, or log 2 times 1200, of the pitch ratio (that is, 100 cents per semitone in conventional ...
The history of logarithms is the story of a correspondence (in modern terms, a group isomorphism) between multiplication on the positive real numbers and addition on the real number line that was formalized in seventeenth century Europe and was widely used to simplify calculation until the advent of the digital computer.
Common logarithm. A graph of the common logarithm of numbers from 0.1 to 100. In mathematics, the common logarithm is the logarithm with base 10. [1] It is also known as the decadic logarithm and as the decimal logarithm, named after its base, or Briggsian logarithm, after Henry Briggs, an English mathematician who pioneered its use, as well as ...
The natural logarithm of e itself, ln e, is 1, because e1 = e, while the natural logarithm of 1 is 0, since e0 = 1. The natural logarithm can be defined for any positive real number a as the area under the curve y = 1/x from 1 to a[4] (with the area being negative when 0 < a < 1). The simplicity of this definition, which is matched in many ...
Typical ten-inch (25 cm) student slide rule (Pickett N902-T simplex trig) A slide rule is a hand -operated mechanical calculator consisting of slidable rulers for evaluating mathematical operations such as multiplication, division, exponents, roots, logarithms, and trigonometry.
If division is much more costly than multiplication, it may be preferable to compute the inverse square root instead. Other methods are available to compute the square root digit by digit, or using Taylor series. Rational approximations of square roots may be calculated using continued fraction expansions.
Discrete logarithm. In mathematics, for given real numbers a and b, the logarithm log b a is a number x such that bx = a. Analogously, in any group G, powers bk can be defined for all integers k, and the discrete logarithm log b a is an integer k such that bk = a. In number theory, the more commonly used term is index: we can write x = ind r a ...
An LNS can be considered as a floating-point number with the significand being always equal to 1 and a non-integer exponent. This formulation simplifies the operations of multiplication, division, powers and roots, since they are reduced down to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, respectively.