| That's a lot of ways to think about logarithms. Logarithms are laughably simple once you've fully internalized the meaning of the log function; it simply answers the question: "To what power must I raise the base to get the argument?" This is why the output tapers out as you increase the argument; because even if you increase the argument exponentially, you only need a fixed increment in the power to reach that number... So if you increase the argument only by a fixed amount (linearly) instead of exponentially, then it makes sense that the output will grow sub-linearly. I remember when I was doing algebra with logs many years ago at school, I was applying rules to remove the log from one side of the equation. Then when I got to uni, I had to revise the rules but it was kind of silly of me because those rules can be trivially derived if you just think about what the log function means. Turns out I had been solving equations with logs throughout school without understanding what they even meant... It's only at university that I actually bothered to learn them. Actually TBH. I didn't even fully understand powers for some time even though I was doing calculus with them at school. I only fully understood powers once I properly internalized the concept of k-ary trees as a proxy. It's one thing to be able to apply something, another to understand it. And I think to innovate with something, as a tool, it's not enough to be able to apply it. You must understand it. |
Seeing there is nothing (right well-beloved Students of the Mathematics) that is so troublesome to mathematical practice, nor that doth more molest and hinder calculators, than the multiplications, divisions, square and cubical extractions of great numbers, which besides the tedious expense of time are for the most part subject to many slippery errors, I began therefore to consider in my mind by what certain and ready art I might remove those hindrances. And having thought upon many things to this purpose, I found at length some excellent brief rules to be treated of (perhaps) hereafter. But amongst all, none more profitable than this which together with the hard and tedious multiplications, divisions, and extractions of roots, doth also cast away from the work itself even the very numbers themselves that are to be multiplied, divided and resolved into roots, and putteth other numbers in their place which perform as much as they can do, only by addition and subtraction, division by two or division by three.
This is what provides the intuition viz; convert multiplication/division/etc. of large numbers into addition/subtraction of two other smaller numbers. Logarithms as inverse of Exponentiation came much later. Starting with this generally confuses the student since they do not understand the point of it all.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logarithms;
Napier conceived the logarithm as the relationship between two particles moving along a line, one at constant speed and the other at a speed proportional to its distance from a fixed endpoint.
Since the speed is directly proportional to its remaining distance from the fixed endpoint, it therefore is a deceleration, which results in the characteristic "flattening" of the curve.
Further details for understanding the above can be found at Priority, Parallel Discovery, and Pre-eminence: Napier, Burgi and the Early History of the Logarithm Relation (pdf) - http://www.numdam.org/item/RHM_2012__18_2_223_0.pdf