Logarithms - A Selection of Classic Mathematical Articles Containing Examples and Exercises on the Subject of Algebra (Mathematics Series)

Before the pocket calculator, a table of logarithms did the heavy lifting in every laboratory, drawing office, and counting house. These classic lessons explain how it works.

Drawn from schoolroom and self-instruction texts of the years before the First World War, Logarithms collects the chapters that generations of pupils learnt from. They begin with the idea of an index, show how a positive number can be written as a power of a fixed base, and go on to the laws that turn multiplication into addition and division into subtraction. The common and natural systems are both covered, along with the use of tables, interpolation, and the reading of characteristic and mantissa.

The topic is still taught in every school, and these older treatments are unusually patient with the beginner: each law is derived rather than announced, and each section ends with problems to work through. The pieces are reprinted with details of the material they came from.

This edition features:

• Classic lessons on logarithms drawn from schoolroom and self-instruction texts of the years before 1914
• The laws of indices and their derivation, worked through a step at a time for the beginner
• Guidance on the common and natural systems, tables, interpolation, characteristic, and mantissa
• Problems following each law, so the method is learnt at the desk rather than memorised
• The provenance of each chapter given, so a reader can go back to the book it came from