What are the real life applications of logarithms?
Here’s a good example from engineering. An aerospace engineer might want to graph the lift of a wing versus the size of the wing, and he wants to show everything from an insect wing all the way up to a jumbo jet. A fly’s wing is maybe 0.1 inch long, and a jumbo jet wing might be 1000 inches long (about 80 ft). It would be pretty tough to put more than one insect on that graph – if you scale the wing length axis to fit on a sheet of paper, all the points for insect wings would be jammed up against one side. Now, instead of plotting length, what if we plot the logarithm of length? There will be as much space on the graph between 0.1 inch and 1 inch as there is between 100 inches and 1000 inches, because log(0.1) = -1 log(1) = 0 log(100) = 2 log(1000) = 3 So the graph will be much easier to read. Logarithms are used in a lot of places to scale numbers when there’s a big range between the smallest and the largest numbers of interest, which makes them easier to talk about. Sound is a pressu
