zuhrovet: Close-up photo of a black-and-white moth in the grass (moth)
Sasha Zuhrovet ([personal profile] zuhrovet) wrote in [community profile] hexarchate_rpg 2018-03-06 02:02 pm (UTC)

Re: logarithms are very practical [ethnomathematics/history of math chitchat]

[I have a vague recollection that there's something in mathematics from India comparable to Nicole Oresme's bar graphs; it wouldn't surprise me if that sort of proto-calculus showed up other places, too.

But as far as I can tell, the first person to graph the logarithm function was Leibniz (historically, you first see tables of values and second the relation to the area under a hyperbola). There's a simplified version of his figure here, and a modern historical discussion in this book. And you can see that Leibniz' figure is very influenced by Euclidean geometry constructions.

Column operations make sense to me from a programming perspective! There are some neat algorithms for exact integer mathematics that must be very important in the hexarchate (this is the one I know about)]

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