On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 2:54 PM, William Stein<wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Tim Lahey <tim.la...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Aug 23, 2009, at 5:25 PM, William Stein wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > So since Tim's from Waterloo that might explain his preference for ln.
>>
>>
>> I preferred ln(x) well before I learned Maple. Plus, all my textbooks
>> used
>> ln(x).
OK, Wikipedia has a pretty useful discussion. It mentions 'As
recently as 1984, Paul Halmos in his "automathography" I Want to Be a
Mathematician heaped contempt on what he considered the childish "ln"
notation, which he said no mathematician had ever used.' I read that
book, so maybe that is one reason I don't like "ln". The Wikipedia
page also says:
"If, as in "log(x)", the base is not given explicitly, it may be
understood implicitly by discipline:
* Mathematicians understand "log(x)" to mean log_e(x). Calculus
textbooks will occasionally write "log(x)" to represent "log_10(x)".
* Many engineers, biologists, astronomers, and some others write
only "ln(x)" or "log_e(x)" when they mean the natural logarithm of x,
and take "log(x)" to mean log_10(x) or, in computer science, log2(x).
* In most commonly used computer programming languages, including C,
C++, Java, Haskell, Fortran, Python, Ruby, and BASIC, the "log"
function returns the natural logarithm. The base-10 function, if it is
available, is generally "log10."
This chaos, historically, originates from the fact that the natural
logarithm has nice mathematical properties (such as its derivative
being 1/x, and having a simple definition), while the base 10
logarithms, or decimal logarithms, were more convenient for speeding
calculations (back when they were used for that purpose)."
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