what exactly *is* a logarithm and what does it do?

Question

I mean, I’ve used them in algebra many times but I never really understood what it does. Kinda like in biostatistics how I could do the math, but how it worked was beyond me entirely.

So yeah: like what’s this sorcery and what does it do/why do we use it?

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

Logarithms make it easier to express exponential growth. For instance, it might be easier to say “1 with twenty zeroes” than 100000000000000000000. In this case, it would be expressed as log10(x)=20. This also works for other things like “I doubled my money five times over” , or log2(x)=20, or “2-byte sound” or log256(x)=2.