Sunday, October 23, 2016

What's a cool thing you ‘invented’ as a kid, only to find it had already been invented?

Logarithms.

I realized as a kid that addition and subtraction were opposites, that multiplication and division were, and immediately after learning about exponents at age 8 or 9 or whatever, sought to find the opposite operation. I remember sitting down with paper and pencil and figuring it out with graphs. I called them “anti-exponents” and proudly showed them to my teacher, who nonchalantly said “Oh, yeah, those are logarithms. You’ll get to them eventually.”



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from Quora http://ift.tt/2edo7cf

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