The first lesson I learned about logarithms is not to mention them when speaking to a large crowd. All the other lessons sucked, so I thought I'd crea

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2024-05-07 18:30:07

The first lesson I learned about logarithms is not to mention them when speaking to a large crowd. All the other lessons sucked, so I thought I'd create my own.

Everyone understands how rulers work: you place them next to tiny trinkets and you look at the ruler's marks to determine the object's size. You can then use a pen and the ruler's marks to represent the size of these objects on a board.

The problem with rulers is that you can’t use them to measure larger objects, such as trees, park benches, and city blocks. To solve that problem, we'll need a bit of imagination.

Instead of having each of our ruler's marks represent 1 inch, we'll pretend they represent 100 inches. That way, we'll compress larger distances into smaller ones.

Notice how we're not using the ruler for measuring anymore. Instead, we're using it to represent the sizes of different objects.

The way we squished hundreds of inches into one mark on the ruler is called a linear transformation because when you draw it on a graph, it makes a straight line. Each mark on the ruler represents 100 more inches, showing a steady, even increase.