Researched
Logarithms (Napier)
Napier's tables (1614) turn multiplication into addition and halve the labour of astronomy and navigation.
Open in the interactive tree →John Napier's 1614 book and Henry Briggs' base-10 tables gave astronomers such as Kepler and later navigators fast arithmetic, and led to the slide rule. The logarithm and its inverse, the exponential, became basic functions of calculus, information theory and machine learning.
Prerequisites
- Trigonometry~150 BC
- Zero, Decimals & Algebra~820
Unlocks
- Calculus (Analysis)1684Logarithms and exponentials are basic functions of calculus
- Information Theory1948Shannon measures information with logarithms