Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Logarithms help represent large and complex items with smaller and simpler concepts. We forget this at our peril.

I used a slide rule in years gone past. It functions on logarithms. These take large numbers and represent them with small numbers. It really is a remarkable concept.

The logarithm concept has been extended to many other fields. Data compression—a good example is the .jpg image file—makes large files much smaller. Much of machine learning uses a single number to represent an entire image or sentence or paragraph.

The examples go on. The examples could go on much further, but we don’t seem to like this. We want all the information at hand. The trouble is, we cannot fathom all the information at hand. It is simply not simple but large and complex, and we get a headache.

Have a headache? Reach for the logarithm or something akin to it in your field.