Homeschool Math Blog

Well today I hopefully have something for everybody. The site DoubleDivision.org shows you an alternative long division algorithm, which takes the guessing away from estimating how many times the divisor goes into what needs divided. Also called 1-2-4-8 division. This is a pretty cool way of dividing! The interactive tool shows you the steps right there for any problem you might come up with. At MathLogarithms.com you can download an ebook by Dan Umbarger explaining logarithm how's, why's, and wherefore's in all detail for students. Great resource for precalculus students. You might also enjoy an alternative way to multiply called lattice multiplication . I did! It seems pretty simple. And lastly, if the math topics didn't interest you, how about my hubby's newest website called Laser-TVs.net ... It's about a totally new way of making TVs using lasers.

Someone asked me recently to make a post about logarithms. So here goes. I already answered the person in an email but I thought I could include some interesting history tidbits here, too. Logarithms are simply the opposite operation of exponentation. For example, from 2 3 = 8 we get log 2 8 = 3, and we read it "base 2 logarithm of 8 equals 3". So it's not difficult: if you understand how exponents work, logarithms have the same numbers, just in a little different places. Just as in exponentiation, a logarithm has a base (2 in the above example). Remember that in 5 3 , 5 is called the base and 3 is the exponent. Other examples: 5 3 = 125 and log 5 125 = 3. 10 4 = 10,000 and log 10 10,000 = 4. 2 x = 345 and log 2 345 = x. As you can see from the last example above, you can use logarithms to solve equations where the x is the exponent: 4 x = 1001 x = log 4 1001. Then you'd get the value of x from a calculator. However, the base of the logarithm can be anything and...