Logarithms

The things missed in Mathematics!

1.       You all must have observed this thing if you have tried to lift very heavy weights.

2.       If you want to lift the weight directly, it is not easy.

3.       But if you use a pulley as shown in the pic, the job is very much simpler.

4.       The concept of Logarithms in Mathematics is just the same.

5.       If you are doing a very lengthy calculation, which involves calculation of many powers of numbers, it is not so easy to do it directly.

6.       So, we can take another way to do it and use logarithms.

7.       What makes work easier with Logarithms? Answer is that it converts multiplication into addition and division into subtraction, both addition and subtraction being easier to perform than huge multiplications and divisions.

8.       Logarithms are also a way of asking the same question differently, that makes it easier to arrive at the answer.

9.       Instead of asking “What is a raised to power x?” Logarithms ask the question “If we have y that is a raised to power x, then what is x?

10.   Sometimes, asking the right question is more important in solving a problem, and Logarithms provide one of the ways to ask the right question.

Few formalized representations:

If y = a^x , then

x = log_ay