Logarithm tables, slide rules, and historical applications[edit]
The 1797 Encyclopædia Britannica explanation of logarithms
By simplifying difficult calculations, logarithms contributed to the advance of science, and especially of astronomy. They were critical to advances in surveying, celestial navigation, and other domains. Pierre-Simon Laplace called logarithms
"...[a]n admirable artifice which, by reducing to a few days the labour of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and spares him the errors and disgust inseparable from long calculations."[36]
A key tool that enabled the practical use of logarithms before calculators and computers was the table of logarithms.[37] The first such table was compiled by Henry Briggs in 1617, immediately after Napier's invention. Subsequently, tables with increasing scope and precision were written. These tables listed the values of logb(x) and bx for any number x in a certain range, at a certain precision, for a certain base b (usually b = 10). For example, Briggs' first table contained the common logarithms of all integers in the range 1–1000, with a precision of 8 digits. As the function f(x) = bx is the inverse function of logb(x), it has been called the antilogarithm.[38] The product and quotient of two positive numbers c and d were routinely calculated as the sum and difference of their logarithms. The product cd or quotient c/d came from looking up the antilogarithm of the sum or difference, also via the same table:
c d = b^{log_b (c)} , b^{log_b (d)} = b^{log_b (c) + log_b (d)} ,
and
frac c d = c d^{-1} = b^{log_b (c) - log_b (d)}. ,
For manual calculations that demand any appreciable precision, performing the lookups of the two logarithms, calculating their sum or difference, and looking up the antilogarithm is much faster than performing the multiplication by earlier methods such as prosthaphaeresis, which relies on trigonometric identities. Calculations of powers and roots are reduced to multiplications or divisions and look-ups by
c^d = (b^{log_b (c) })^d = b^{d log_b (c)} ,
and
sqrt[d]{c} = c^{frac 1 d} = b^{frac{1}{d} log_b (c)}. ,
Many logarithm tables give logarithms by separately providing the characteristic and mantissa of x, that is to say, the integer part and the fractional part of log10(x).[39] The characteristic of 10 · x is one plus the characteristic of x, and their significands are the same. This extends the scope of logarithm tables: given a table listing log10(x) for all integers x ranging from 1 to 1000, the logarithm of 3542 is approximated by
log_{10}(3542) = log_{10}(10cdot 354.2) = 1 + log_{10}(354.2) approx 1 + log_{10}(354). ,
Another critical application was the slide rule, a pair of logarithmically divided scales used for calculation, as illustrated here:
A slide rule: two rectangles with logarithmically ticked axes, arrangement to add the distance from 1 to 2 to the distance from 1 to 3, indicating the product 6.
Schematic depiction of a slide rule. Starting from 2 on the lower scale, add the distance to 3 on the upper scale to reach the product 6. The slide rule works because it is marked such that the distance from 1 to x is proportional to the logarithm of x.
The non-sliding logarithmic scale, Gunter's rule, was invented shortly after Napier's invention. William Oughtred enhanced it to create the slide rule—a pair of logarithmic scales movable with respect to each other. Numbers are placed on sliding scales at distances proportional to the differences between their logarithms. Sliding the upper scale appropriately amounts to mechanically adding logarithms. For example, adding the distance from 1 to 2 on the lower scale to the distance from 1 to 3 on the upper scale yields a product of 6, which is read off at the lower part. The slide rule was an essential calculating tool for engineers and scientists until the 1970s, because it allows, at the expense of precision, much faster computation than techniques based on tables.[33]
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