Introduction

Among other things, this is indeed a paper about Logarithms! I hope the difference between Logarithms! and logarithms will be clear at the end. Evidently Logarithms! are the nicer kind, but if that is not enough to entice you to read on, let me at once answer three questions:

1. (1) For whom am I writing?

2. (2) What about?

3. (3) Why?

1. (1) I am writing for physicists who teach the one-year course in “liberal arts physics” for students with absolutely no trace of professional interest in the subject. Although the paper itself simply presents the contents of the lectures on Logarithms! that I have given such students for several years, the presentation here is aimed at a more sophisticated audience of colleagues, to reveal to them briefly and efficiently how the techniques can be used. The paper might be of some interest to the students themselves, but if they can follow the argument without help they probably don't belong in the course for which it is intended.

2. (2) I am writing about three different things:

3. (a) An efficient and entertaining way to review arithmetic skills in manipulating powers, which, for typical students in the “liberal arts” physics course, may have lain unused for as many as four years. Without restoring such skills to them it is virtually impossible to teach any physics whatever.

4. […]