We've been flooded by interesting comments, remarks, and so on, and so
forth, but, in my opinion, very little (almost nothing I would say) has
been answered as far as Arnaud's QUESTIONS (see below) are concerned.
The reason for 'building' __logarithms__ is not the same as the (sought)
reason for 'building' the __logarithmic function__. I friendly encourage
kind souls to be much more helpful while replying. For instance:
> was it Neper who looked for a function f such that f(ab)=f(a)+f(b) ?
No, Napier did not get quite this far [NOT even a Whiggish interpretation
of Napier's *own* logs would allow us to conclude that log 1 = 0].
.
.
.
Et cetera
Greetings from rainy and busy Montevideo,
Julio GC
At 06:31 PM 16/11/1999 +0200, Arnaud Pascal wrote:
>
> Hello everybody
>
> A colleague asks me what was the reason of building logarithmic function
> - was it Neper who looked for a function f such that f(ab)=f(a)+f(b) ?
> - was it to complete the primitives of x->1/x on ]0; +\infty[ ?
> - was it other things ?