Asked in School SubjectsMath and ArithmeticAlgebra
School Subjects
Math and Arithmetic
Algebra
Why can the base of a logarithm be neither less than or equal to zero nor equal to one?
Answer

Wiki User
November 11, 2007 5:53PM
A logarithm is written like this: logab It is asking: 'How many a's must be multiplied together to get b?' or 'To what power must a be raised to get b?' Those questions are normally impossible to answer if a is zero or one, because these numbers remain the same no matter what the power. If a is negative, then the need to introduce imaginary and complex numbers will arise.
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Asked in Algebra
How do you find a logarithm from a table?

You look the number up in a table.
Example:
Find the logarithm of 511
From a table I see that numbers are only listed from 1.00 to
9.99
I look up 5.11 and know that I have to multiply that by 100 or
102 to get my original value, which is equivalent to adding 2 to
the table value.
The table gives me 0.7084209 for the logarithm for 5.11
The logarithm of 511 is thus 2.7084209
For numbers less than 1 the logarithm will be
negative!
Negative numbers do have logarithms!