The Most Useful Curve in Mathematics
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- Опубликовано: 2 фев 2024
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References
The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets - Martin Campbell-Kelly
Navigation - James Pryde
e: the story of a number - Eli Maor
Description of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms - John Napier
Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms - John Napier
Arithmetical Logarithmica - Henry Briggs, translated by Ian Bruce www.17centurymaths.com/conten...
The Daring Invention of Logarithm Tables - Klaus Truemper
Henry Briggs MacTutor: mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk...
A reconstruction of the tables of Briggs’ Arithmetica logarithmica - Denis Roegel
A reconstruction of the tables of Napier’s descriptio (1614) - Denis Roegel
The HP-35 Design, A Case Study in Innovation - David S. Cochran www.hpmemoryproject.org/wb_pa...
The Polyphase Slide Rule A Self Teaching Manual - William E. Breckenridge
When Slide Rules Ruled - Cliff Stoll 
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I'm almost convinced we should be giving students slide rules to teach them about logarithms. Sometimes touching the mathematics makes it more real. Thanks for your time in putting this together!
I was an engineering student in the late 60's, and although I used a sliderule exclusively and knew the reason why it worked, I really didn't think much about it. As long as I kept track of where the decimal place was!
Before watching : 23 mins is really long
After watching : should be at least 2 hours
Yeah I originally thought this was going to be way shorter - but it got kinda deep!
@@WelchLabsVideoI really enjoyed the presentation and pacing. Your team all did an excellent job, many thanks 👍🌞
Ima be honest I thought I already replied because of my pfp
I thought so too, but the argument is compelling
Me reading the comments before watching the video, to see if would be worth it over Idk, another video 😅: Yea, must be exaggerating, but I'll give it a go nonetheless
Me after watching the video: when is the missing hour and 37 minutes gonna be released?
Really niche application warning : Logarithms (large ones) permeate so many theoretical nuclear physics calculations, especially ones describing processes where multiple, widely separated scales are relevant (eg. collider events where electron + positron --> 2 jets ). These large logs can ruin so many predictions in perturbative QCD if you're not careful. The expansion parameter (alpha_s) is small, but they multiply these large logs which ruins the convergence of the expansion. People then learned how to "resum" these large logs using things like renormalization group equations and effective field theories to obtain some of the most precise predictions in QCD to date (like extracting the value of alpha_s, the strong coupling constant). Logs almost ruined perturbation theory, but instead they suggested a more powerful way of predicting things perturbatively (N^kLL accuracy: Next-to^k Leading Log accuracy) in a lot of situations.
Hey Andrew! So nice to see you here, it's been a while since I saw one of your videos, but you, along with Zach Star, were one of my "gateway" science communicators all those years ago. I am now beginning my Masters in Advanced Manufacturing Systems, and I wanted to thank you for being an inspiration. Hope to see more sketches on your channel once you are done with your PhD. Cheers!
holy shit its andrew dotson
Damn. Is this English I'm reading?
Woah interesting
I don't know if this will help you at your very high level of mathematics, but ... another valid form of logarithm is not a decimal number but a continued fraction. Viewing logarithms as decimals seems like a necessity, but it is not the only form that they can take. There is an abbreviated form of continued fraction notation that I like at my hobbyist level: the fraction 1/3 can be represented by [0;3]. My general point is that the paradigm of logarithms only as decimals might cause problems. Even simple arithmetic with continued fractions is its own issue, but the idea of paradigm paralysis is still something, you know? The representation of numbers colors the perspective of the math involved.
It also describes Welch Labs upload frequency 😢
PS Since calculators are banned upto high school, we still use log tables to do calculations during exams in India
That is dumb as rocks. There is absolutely no difference punching in the numbers and getting the answer... and looking up the answer in a book.
@@andersjjensenyou are correct there is no difference. This method just isn't for lazy people. Believe it or not some enjoy the puzzle aspect of a problem.
@@andersjjensen Agreed for using tables. and yet... Knowing how to use a slide rule really does enhance understanding. Maybe they should require slide rules and ban tables too! 😄
@@andersjjensen speaks a lot about the indian education system. What is rote is praised.
@@andersjjensen Not really, it teaches you how these systems works. Ancient, yes. But still works and useful.
Also big note here, cheating with rigged calculator is *very easy* to do.
In honor of Henry Briggs I calculated logarithms of 10 from 1 to 10000000 to 16 digits of precision, with following line of python np.log10(np.arange(1,int(1e6))), which instead of 7 years of my life, took around 7 ms of my life
I wonder how much the book cost in todays money when it was published. 7 years of mind melting labor must not have been cheap, so no wonder all the rest just copied his work for 300 years.
Then again if your work is used by next 300 years by literally EVERYONE you can be kind of proud of yourself
> I wonder how much the book cost in todays money when it was published
Probably not much - at least not significantly more than any other book at the time. It was a couple hundred years before the invention of capitalism and a lot of this kind of work was done by rich people just because they were interested in doing it. The primary "currency" they were looking for was reputation, not physical wealth.
You often self-published either on your own dime or that of a patron just enough copies to send to those who you thought might be interested (or that you wanted to brag to). The printing press made doing so a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to be sure, but it was still nowhere near comparable to the millions of copies sent all over the world for consumption by the general public that we see today.
That's not to say books weren't bought and sold - they absolutely were - but mostly as a secondary market. Sold off because the owner needed money or died and their inheritors didn't care about books or straight up stolen/looted by thieves. (At least for this kind of works. Things with regular editions and broad audiences like almanacs and trade pamphlets are a different story of course - those were much more widely published in a manner similar to today's publishing industry.)
@ altrag
books were sold for as much as it cost to make (and copy) them. If it wasn't sustainable, the author did it once and that was it. After the printing press was invented this process became cheaper and publishers paid authors for first print exclusivity, but after that everybody had a go at it - the author got it's share and the publisher had to see how to make the revenue work for themselves to sustain it (books were cheap and plenty)... and then copyright got invented in the UK in the 17th century and the publishers were able to control the supply AGAINST CAPITALIST PRINCIPLES by disabling competition. One of the reasons Germany was able to catch up to the UK was because copyright got introduced there only a century later - so books that distributed knowledge and information were plenty and cheap in Germany at that time.
He used a computer.
From wiki:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of computer was in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [sic] read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer [sic] breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." This usage of the term referred to a human computer, a person who carried out calculations or computations. The word continued with the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this period women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male counterparts.[1] By 1943, most human computers were women.[2]
You only calculated from 1 to 1000000, not 10000000. You should have typed in 1e7 for the result you wanted
@@shardinalwind7696 Maybe he meant 1000000.
For anyone interested, the formula is: -10^7 * ln(x / 10^7)
(Napier's Logarithm)
it's just a log
@@yonaoisme just using the log does no give 28804057 from 561000
Am I retarded or does that simplify to ln(x)?
remove negative
@@SinanKaya-cl5hoit will be the right way around then
Checked on Desmos
Fascinating. I had never considered the origin of logarithms, I thought they had been defined simply to complete the triad of operations "Power-Root-Logarithm", but this is much more intuitive. There are certain things I had to pause and write down to get a good understanding, but I feel like I can try to teach this with a more open mind now.
I just realized that the reason there's these 3 operations related to exponents (power/root/log) instead of 2 operations like with addition (add/subtract) and multiplication (multiply/divide) is that addition and multiplication are commutative, unlike exponentiation.
I learned all three in school, logs, slide ruler, and cheap calculator - this was back in the 70's. In college we used another marvelous method - Nomographs. Layered onto that was dimensionless groups. You would be shocked how far that will take you in designing the modern world. Did I mention 3D models? We had them, they were physical models, but valuable tools all the same. We also had analog computers for heat transfer. You can use amps, ohms and volts to represent complex geometries. We also had a massive IBM computer and allocation of 1 second of computing time per semester.
I’d love a set of slide rules that had saturation data, or even if there was a way to add PVT gas properties onto slide rules I’d buy them any day. It’s crazy how we still have to use NIST tables or have to rely on software calculators for quick hand calcs, it’s not quick at all
I heard the phrase "dimensional analysis" when I was in college, in the 80's, but it was little more than "always check your units." I didn't discover until decades later, just because of prowling around the internet endlessly, the real full scope of that topic. I feel sure that in earlier times it was taught as a routine part of an engineering education - I really hate it that some of those great ideas have fallen off the radar.
The "Handbook of Mathematical Functions: with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables" by Milton Abramowitz & Irene A. Stegun contains a treasure trove of information, and not too expensive. Learning to read function tables is valuable in "sanity checking" hand and computer calculations.
Thank you for recommending this
I think that asking Napier to do that arduous task again was a bit much - I don't blame him for avoiding that.
16:34 - According to my calculator (a SwissMicros DM42 which does 34 digits of accuracy), Briggs's value for log(1.024) is correct out to the 952; after that he has a 6 and the calculator value has a 1. So 17 correct digits.
In the first 60 seconds of the video you managed to show me WHY the log equivalencies are true, that my teachers failed for years.
I mean I now and use them, but I never SAW why they work, why multiplication becomes addition and so on
GOOD JOB!!!
I never ran across this amazing piece of history, but I did hear that we used slide rules to do all the science and engineering to go to the moon. Unbelievable! Thanks for a great video 👍
Well… that’s partially true.
Computers were also heavily used. Here is a summery from Google:
During the Apollo missions, an on-board computer and large computers on Earth performed the critical guidance and navigation calculations necessary for a successful journey. In addition, crews carried a slide rule for more routine calculations.
Thanks for watching!
A lot of work was done on slide rules in the 1960's only because managers sequestered computers for "data processing". That meant payroll and accounting. And engineers were not allowed access because they might acquire marketable skills. Barney Oliver began the climb out of this darkness. But his HP-35 was still worthless for optical ray tracing because the sines of very small angles were not accurate. This was fixed in HP-45. Every time you hit that button, you save the time of looking in a table and doing the interpolation! And you avoid the chance of error in calculation or copying the results from one paper to another. At one airplane factory where I worked, certain programmable calculators were declared "unauthorized data processing instruments" and were banned (until the program collapsed and the entire division was dissolved in 1993). But we all used them anyway, knowing how such rules originated. By this time we were starting to get '286 machines, but were not allowed any meaningful engineering software, nor could we get ink ribbons for our printers. A little WD-40 could give a ribbon extended life, but eventually...
LOL @ believing we actually went to the moon
@@firstname4337 Is that the royal 'we'?
I never understood these logic tables. Your explanation was so intuitive! Thank you!
In school, we were taught that "log(a^c) = c" meaning you can technically export the exponent of a number in a base. I found this explanation adequately useful (and I could remember the formula by saying AssAssin's Creed C [don't ask why that worked for me. Maybe bc it had the right number of letters in the right order?])
I have a few really silly mnemonics for math too.
F.e.:
I always remember the trig functions with an association to Lady Gaga (That works only in German tho).
To remember surjectivity and injectivity of graphs, I always say to myself: "A positive parabola eats a Surschnitzel (that's a special kind of schnitzel)", because when f(x) = x², where R->R+ (cutting of negative y axis) the graph is surjective, but not injective.
And for the roots of a complex number, I made myself the pikachu rule.
Adding 2*pi*k to theta (polar angle), were k goes from 0 to n-1 (where n describes the n-ths root, because there are n roots of the n-th root of a complex number), before dividing by n, gives all roots.
2*pi*k = pi*k + pi*k (which sounds like pika pika)
This is an amazing video. I really appreciate that you went into depth on how they were actually calculated. The realization that you can essentially do a binary search with an iterative algorithm to find any value of a function is so, and even cooler when you learn that this is how computers calculate logarithms, trig functions, etc. to this day. Basically any time you can find a relationship where x/2 = f(y) or vice versa, you can do this. It is just so cool that you can do something a crazy as logarithms or trig *by hand* with enough will power, and it's not even that crazy difficult lol. I would love more content like this, so keep it up!
This is cool! Makes me realize that the term “logbook” is likely directly related to the logarithm, since it came from the “Ship’s Log.” I always used to think that logbooks (and related words) were just coincidentally the same as the word for logarithm, due to “logos” meaning knowledge and stuff, but it’s cool to see the connection between math and language!
wow
But they say that ship’s log comes from chip log, an instrument
I've only ever heard "logbook" used to refer to a record of service for a car, or some other form of transport. When I finished high school and commenced Engineering at university in the seventies, we used books of logarithms because I couldn't afford the fancy new HP35 calculator. I used a simple slide rule so the connection between logarithms and slide rules has always been obvious to me. Nowadays, logarithms and slide rules are historical relics. I still enjoyed Veritasium's video.
@@CallOfCutie69 Can confirm. The log literally was a log that you threw into the water so that the ship's speed could be calculated from how fast it passed the log. This figure was then recorded in the ship's log.
Interestingly, when I became a navigator some 4 decades ago, using logarithms was considered the only reliable way to do celestial navigation and ship stability calculations. Even after satellite navigators were installed on board, we still used sextants and logarithms to check that the satellite navigator was displaying the correct position.
@@ChrisTaylor-NEP must have been an exiting job. It’s interesting how you can find people with careers spanning so long in RUclips comments. I hope you’re doing well. I myself would be afraid of any position that exposes me to the sun, because of photo damage to the skin. Do you feel being outside so much ages you faster?
I been suddenly struck by the pervasiveness of RUclips videos on logarithms - most presenting them as this utterly amazing and wonderful thing. And they are, of course. But before I started paying attention to this I just took it for granted that at least 80% of people walking around on the street would KNOW what logarithms were - I've always regarded them as part of basic high school math that everyone learned as they came along. It's a little sad that seems not to be the case.
Thank you for taking me from vague idea of how those tables and slide rules worked to actual understanding. I'm thrilled to see anything you upload!
A beautifully put-together explanation. I like the touch of the basic animations.
A very nice piece of history and mathematics wrapped together. Of course you know about Charles Babbage's Difference engine and how it was proposed to be used to solve polynomials. I got to see one in action at the History of Computing, Paul Alan (of Microsoft fame) commissioned it to be made with intentional machining errors to replicate the technology of the day when Babbage was alive, just to see if it were built, would it work. And the answer was yes, but the crank mechanism would have had to be beefed up, but still in the realm of what could be possible. It was a joy to watch, and they loaded the cams as the input of the polynomial to be solved and set the wheels, then started cranking out the answers. They had a mechanical printer and... oh my gosh you have to find out more about it, it's more than I can share in a comment. I think there's more about it online. Cheers!
The most useful curve in mathematics is
x^2 + y^2 = r^2 for -r
Watching this video was like contemplating a work of art. Math is wonderful. Great work, Welch Labs team!
missed your explanations. Appreciate your great work
Interestingly, there exist other functions that can convert multiplication into addition/subtraction. E.g. consider the function F(x) = x^2 / 2
Then for any a and b:
F(a) = a^2 / 2
F(b) = b^2 / 2
F(a - b) = (a - b)^2 / 2 = a^2 / 2 - ab + b^2 / 2 = F(a) + F(b) - ab
Thus:
F(a) + F(b) - F(a - b) = ab
So you convert multiplication into two subtractions and two additions.
One rathee want: f(ab) = f(a) + f(b)
@@ossigaming8413 it depends. To calculate a product with F(ab) = F(a) + F(b) one has to do two lookups, one addition and an inverse lookup. With the half-square function you don't need the inverse.
Common mistake is to forget that arithmetic operations take time that isn't constant, but proportional to uhh logarithm of the number.
So it's not just more addition/subtractions if you use F. They're also exponentially harder to compute.
If you account to that, logarithm is the only cheapest function.
Try cosα*cosβ=[cos(α−β)+cos(α+β)]/2. Tables of half cosines were published to facilitate this method.
Love how you nailed saying 9999999 a dozen times without messing up
Thank you...Brilliant job! Great and exemplary use of music. Just frickin' fantastic.
Very cool to learn that slide rules rely on logarithms, I didn't realize that. I knew about log tables but I didn't realize that the slide rule itself was an embodiment of this "easier calculation" quality of logarithms. :)
An absolutely delightful program.
Amazing history and amazing explanation. Thank you for your hard work in production of this video!
Thanks for watching!
"You can't outdo me, I'm the god of rhythm
All natural like the LOGARITHM"
- 3Blew1Blown by JoFo
Welch! So great to see you pop up in my feed! Loving this production value, wow!
Thanks so much!
Nice video. It frustrates me that the history & practical use of mathematics is often an afterthought. I learned and used logarithms at high school & university, but to me it's just an abstract thing. If you ask a random person in the street what a logarithm is (even someone who has learned & used them in education), they will likely shrug.
To me, education should start with something like this video! It's really motivating to understand how these techniques revolutionised travel & other parts of life.
Wow, you just opened my eyes to some new concept I didn’t completely understand.
As a radio enthusiast from the age of 11 (made my first crystal set then with one of the new fangled germanium diodes, price 2/6), I cannot remember not understanding logarithms. It helped that my dad was a Cambridge educated engineer.
I loved how you tied it back to early tech. It reminds me of my dear old dad's slide rule and calculator. As a kid as I fascinated with both. Great to learn some history behind it! Thanks
Glad you enjoyed it!
Circular slide rules are still used by student pilots in training.
The circular construction of the slide rule enables additional functionality related to temperature, wind, speed, pressure-altitude, etc.
See: The CRP-5
Wonderful video! Thanks for kicking out another vid for us. We’ve missed you!
Beautiful production!
Very well explained. Can you do a video on how you do your animations?
My venerable HP32S that I got in 1989 really *is* an electronic slide rule.
That was a fun video!
Time to move up. My current favorite is the WP-34s. It is built on the HP-30 business analyst. But for real power, get the free iPhone app or the PC emulator; runs a hundred times faster on long programs. The iPhone app has keys that won't go bad like the HP post Fiorina hardware. HP Prime is also available as an iPhone and a PC app. But it has nothing to do with HP; as far as I know it is a development of the US Royal Typewriter company. There is more inside that beast than you can ever learn.
Really excellent video. I loved the pacing
thank you for such high quality and highly dense knowledge content
I've always wondered how slide rules worked. Great story telling!
I've always loved Logs, they make complex problems comically easy. Also very interesting and a good tool in calculus.
This was beautiful. Thank you.
The first minute is SUCH a nice way to show that taking a log of multiplication (division) yields addition (subtraction)! Love it!
Woohoo!
Very well explained. Thank you.
Fascinating story. Thank you for gathering and presenting.
Nicola Tesla was said to do absolutely astonishing mathematics in his head, like calculating square roots and other stuff that seemed impossible, because he memorized logarithm tables!
I really love these videos. Thank you welch labs. The most interesting part in this video, showing the process of invention.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks for this video! I knew about the history, but I've never seen how the values in the tables were actually calculated.
From the functional equation for logs, f(xy)=f(x)+f(y), you can show that its derivative f'(x)=f'(1)/x, so, since f(1)=0, f(x)=integral from 1 to x of f'(1)/t dt. The natural log of x, to base e, is gotten by chosing f'(1)=1. From this you can get the power series valid for -1
Man, what a journey. I think i have a table like this in the "old books back when my parents were in uni" stack, along with National Semiconductor chips datasheets and anatomy textbook.
Imagine if Briggs copyrighted his table, log tables would *never* be this successful. Kinda weird that maps somehow is copyrightable, but math tables aren't.
An extremely beautiful video! Great work! ❤
I was just hoping to understand where ‘e’ came from and why is it the natural log?
In college, I routinely used a slide rule and log tables. I was a senior when the first TI and (somewhat later) the HP calculator became affordable to a college student.
Awesome!! Thank you!
An incredible video that breaks them down and helps understand what they are! I wish that I had seen this before I went to college.
I have an animation question, if you have a moment!
How did you animate the numbers come off of the page at 5:42? I'm working on some projects to use my physical typefaces, and I think that would be so handy!
Thanks for watching! I just used illustrator & premiere.
Lovely video! I had always thought of these fundamental things that who the heck wrote logarithm values during the time of hand calculations, who found out the multiplication and long division methods that we use, ...
Your videos are the best explainers of how did the modern mathematics come to exist.
Thank you!
Wake up, new Welch Labs video. We've been blessed today
Man you are crazy for writing all those digits. Such a great video.
Just for fun, teach yourself how to calculate square roots one digit at a time. the first couple of digits may be difficult, but after those, you will discover that the process can be greatly sped up with use of.... a slide rule! [No fair using a table of logarithms!]
Lol was thinking the same thing when i did it wrong the first time and had to start over!
Yeah, I Wish I had this instruction / early on.
Stretch and squish und integer.
Beautiful stuff. I enjoyed the book and wood patterns.
I used to study industrial Technologies and this logarithmic notation is very useful not only on the digital scale but it goes to analog also
That was amazing. RUclips really allows experts like Mr Welch to enlighten us all. I found this so exciting!
Fab. Now I understand. Subscribed.
Brilliant work
this was very interesting. I used use a slide rule back in the 70's when I was in high school. I thought it was pretty simple. Then someone invented the HP calculator and I couldn't get my head around it, but everyone else loved it. Memories.
It bothered me when I asked how logs work to my maths teacher and just got a response like "It's just how you figure this out".
This is super helpful! but I can't even remember the types of questions we were using them on 😅
The starting music is 'A well lit cafe' I first heard it from an exurb1a video, since then I been listening to it while studying.
Nice!
The fact that "there exists a group homomorphism from the reals under addition to the +ve reals under multiplication" still feels like magic to me.
I know right! It's like another dimension.
Excellent, thank you
Well now you've got me jazzed to pick up a slide rule and practice with it. That was neat, thanks.
Nice!
Best explanation of this historical computation!
Thank you!
Always a pleasure! Thank you.
Amazing and educactional. I will use this video with my math students this year.
Awesome let me know how it goes!
@@WelchLabsVideo I will!
WOW!!! Just WOW!!!
I love math but knowing the history of its discovery is much more fun!!!😂
Thank you for this video! Epic!❤
Would be great if you made another video linking how Logarithms help aid in the invention of the number e and/ or how this leads to the Natural Logarithm. Love Your vids!!! Keep it up💖💖
Noted!
Eulers number was THE only thing I felt was left out of this blast of brain-candy, but understandably may have waranted it's own video. It's a shame that 20 minutes seems to be the defacto standard for attention spans these days. I second the motion to "Keep it up".
What an excellent video. Thank you.
I am a proud owner of 3 slide rules. When I did my attempt at pilots license in 2007 ~ 2009, We had to purchase and use a circular vesion of the slide rule. It is called a "E6-B Flight computer". Mine has survirved.
E6-B? I used my father's from the 1950's. But it lacked a scale for density altitude. I worked out a simple way to do DA, but the flight instructor went ballistic, "You can't do that!" It gave the right answers, what's he complaining about? Not flying any more due to glaucoma.
This is off topic, but I would love to know all the books in your library. Would give me an idea of what kind of knowledge you like to pursue.
Amazing video as always!
Please upload more frequently-your videos are some of the best available on RUclips!
Working on it!
That curve happens to be the V/I curve of a forward-biased PN semiconductor junction.
It allows the use of a simple diode to build logarithm amplifiers and converters. It is at the base of analogue computers...
Nice!
The base of analog computers is the operational amplifier, not the diode.
How would you use this curve for roots and powers, also would you be able to use to when it comes to tetration, pentation, and hextration? I’m in alg 2 rn so try to simplify the steps as much as possible lol
@welshlab, thank you for this.. it completely made everything made sense...
This has a lot of parallels to how the use of basic waveforms, which in the digital world takes the from of tables of values like the y values here, comprises the backbone of audio synthesis/analysis. So much can be done with tables of curves/waves/etc.
Amazing video, the content, story telling, videography, and (most importantly) the math! Phenomenal job, keep up the good work!
p.s. We use the same calculator :D
Cool. Thanks for sharing.
I would think that one could use the fact that log((a+b)/2) = log(sqrt(a*b)) to produce a table of interpolated values until one reached the point where linear interpolation would be acceptably accurate. Alternatively, given a table of eleven values with the antilog of 1.0, 1.1, etc. up to 2.0, it's possible to compute logarithms at a cost of five multiplies per decimal digit of result. Given a value 1.0 to 10, the first digit of the logarithm will be 1 and the second digit can be found using the aforementioned table. Either divide by the largest table entry below one's value, or multiply by entry 10-k and divide by 10, to get an answer in the range between 1.0 and 10**(1.1). Then raise that number to the tenth power (compute its square, and the square of that, multiply those to get the fifth power, and square that to get the tenth power--four multipliex) to yield a value from 1.0 to 10, use the table to find the next digit, etc.
you are back!!!!
Thank you for the video. It is so important to know "why" things work to really appreciate how they work.
I had a better comment, but it got mucked up by someone with a big head that had to tell me how wrong I was in a loooonnng post. I deleted my comment because I didn't want anyone else subjected to that. Whether or not I was wrong, that person overgeneralized my comment and went way too far to prove his superior intellect. It's humorous to me that I was able to delete his 30 minutes of ranting. Very refreshing.
Brought up with log tables and slide rules, I could use a slide rule so fast that it is hard to believe how fluent it became, and log tables where only used when high precision was required, I remember my first calculator it was the 'President', six AAA batteries and a red power hungry LED display, after that I lost the ability to use log tables and a slide rule so quickly.
I was looking for this video since I have seen bits of it on Tik Tok. Going to show it to all my math students and colleagues as well. Splendid job Welch Labs.
Awesome thanks for watching!
Awsome video! Nice historical perspective, excellent teaching didacts merged with good visual effects. The only missing topic is the mechanical calculator, like The Curta, which were used to calculat the wiring of early eletromechanical and eletronic calculators.
I do not think Curta used logs. It is an amazingly complicated adding machine.
@@martincohen8991 True, the Curta is digital, not analog. That's a whole other chapter in the history of computation.
Mechanical calculators were helpful for getting more precise results than you could get from a slide rule, but they also tended to be complicated, relatively expensive devices (aside from the simplest adding machines). The slide rule only gave you results to a few decimal places but every engineer could carry one around, so that was the rough and ready "pocket calculator". And they often had scales for doing things more complicated than multiplication and division, through a kind of analog table lookup.
Thank you for the video.
Because of the way he calculated them, Napier's logarithm was actually closer to the *natural* logarithm (base e) than to Briggs' common logarithm (base 10). Specifically (according to Wikipedia), Napier's log was -10,000,000 * ln(x/10,000,000). So, they're natural logs aside from a sign reversal and a decimal shift.
The natural logarithm was less useful as a calculation aid but more useful as a concept in pure mathematics, so you actually tend to see them more today.
This was a fantastic video, thank you for taking the time to make it.
Glad you enjoyed it!
absolutely fantastic video
This was a great piece of history.
Logarithms are super useful in game design
making something scale infinitely but also slow down as you go is really easy with logarithms and super useful
That's a practical application for ya
Wow I'll never look at logarithms in the same way! Thanks for this video.