Logarithm table

History and use

Tables of common logarithms were used until the invention of computers and electronic calculators to do rapid multiplications, divisions, and exponentiations, including the extraction of nth roots. Logarithm tables allowed users to replace some multiplication and division problems with the use of logarithms and antilogarithms. After John Napier introduced logarithms in the early seventeenth century, table makers such as Henry Briggs and Edmund Gunter produced logarithmic and trigonometric-logarithmic tables for practical calculation. These tables reduced the amount of arithmetic that users had to perform directly, especially in repeated calculations.