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The method of logarithms was publicly propounded for the first time by John Napier in 1614, in his book entitled Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (Description of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms). [1] The book contains fifty-seven pages of explanatory matter and ninety pages of tables of trigonometric functions and their natural ...
Download as PDF; Printable version; ... the logarithm of a number is the exponent by which another fixed value, ... in a book titled Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis ...
A page from Henry Briggs' 1617 Logarithmorum Chilias Prima showing the base-10 (common) logarithm of the integers 0 to 67 to fourteen decimal places. Part of a 20th-century table of common logarithms in the reference book Abramowitz and Stegun. A page from a table of logarithms of trigonometric functions from the 2002 American Practical Navigator.
The logarithm in the table, however, is of that sine value divided by 10,000,000. [1]: p. 19 The logarithm is again presented as an integer with an implied denominator of 10,000,000. The table consists of 45 pairs of facing pages. Each pair is labeled at the top with an angle, from 0 to 44 degrees, and at the bottom from 90 to 45 degrees.
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 ...
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 ...
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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.