Logarithm - Motivation and Definition

Motivation and Definition

The idea of logarithms is to reverse the operation of exponentiation, that is raising a number to a power. For example, the third power (or cube) of 2 is 8, because 8 is the product of three factors of 2:

It follows that the logarithm of 8 with respect to base 2 is 3, so log2 8 = 3.

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