Sunday, April 18, 2004

Back
I know Iam Writing after a long time. At times, I would want to type but I may not be online or other times plain bored to log information. But now that interest and being online are both in place I am begun to log (atleast for some time I think);

After a really long time we discussed mathematics. Not that its not applicable but the kinda of theoretical turn the discussion took it questioned our basic understanding of some simple ideas that we often take for granted. For instance, why do we use logarithms, how are numbers populated in the log-tables, why is e=2.71 and how does it relate to logarithms?
Well, Napier's method has a lot of thinking for us to do. The central part that I missed over the past several years is that how do logarithms simplify calculations. I only has a vague idea that it reduces multiplication to additions thereby simplifying calculations. The explanation I gave myself was:

log(a*b) is log(a) + log(b)

Here * is being re-written to a + and this may simplify calculation as most people are good at addition than multiplication.

I hunted around for some information about what logarithms really are. I am surprised how I learnt logarithms without knowing some of this for this long.

Heres a link that gives some details:
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52469.html

Another question which actually Chandan shot up was how can you be sure that to prove(disprove) that a number is (not a) prime you need to verify the divisibility of the number for numbers 2 to square-root number. Simple ain't it? Something I remember learning in my grade-school. Chandan himself did all the book-searching and came up with the rigourous proof. I'll leave out the nitty-gritty details from here.

Thats it for now.