Subsection 7.3.1 A Logarithm is an Exponent
Suppose that a colony of bacteria doubles in size every day. If the colony starts with 50 bacteria, how long will it be before there are 800 bacteria?
We answer questions of this type by writing and solving an exponential equation. The initial value of the population is
and the growth factor is
Thus, the function
gives the number of bacteria present on day
and we must solve the equation
We are looking for an unknown exponent on base 2. Dividing both sides by 50 yields
This equation asks the question:
"To what power must we raise 2 in order to get 16?"
Because
we see that the solution of the equation is
You can check that
solves the original problem:
The unknown exponent that solves the equation
is called the
base logarithm of
The exponent in this case is
and we write this fact as
In other words, we solved an exponential equation by computing a logarithm. We make the following definition.
Definition 7.3.1. Definition of Logarithm.
the
base logarithm of is the exponent to which
must be raised in order to yield
We write the logarithm as
Some logarithms, like some square roots, are easy to evaluate, while others require a calculator. We’ll start with the easy ones.
Example 7.3.2.
Here are some examples of logarithms.
because
because
because
because
We see that in each example the logarithm is the exponent we need on the given base.
Checkpoint 7.3.4. Practice 1.
(What exponent on 3 gives me 81?)
(What exponent on 10 gives me )
From the definition of a logarithm and the examples above, we see that the following two statements are equivalent.
Logarithms and Exponents: Conversion Equations.
This equivalence tells us that the logarithm,
is the same as the
exponent in
We see again that
a logarithm is an exponent; it is the exponent to which
must be raised to yield
For example, to convert the equation
to exponential form, we note that the base is
and the logarithm is
so the exponent on base 5 will be 3, like this:
The
conversion equations allow us to convert from logarithmic to exponential form, or vice versa. It will help you to become familiar with the conversion, because we will use it frequently.
As special cases of the equivalence above, we can compute the following useful logarithms.
Some Useful Logarithms.
Example 7.3.5.
Here are some more examples. Once again, we are looking for the exponent on the given base
to get
because
because
because, well,
Checkpoint 7.3.6. QuickCheck 1.