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Re: Birthday Probabilities
Posted By: Don the Monkeyman, on host 24.70.0.3
Date: Monday, August 27, 2001, at 13:13:43
In Reply To: Re: Happy Birthday, Howard! posted by Travholt on Monday, August 27, 2001, at 09:53:44:

> Ah, thanks! That's the kind of response I was looking for. :-) It's been so long since I studied math that I don't even remember the workings of logarithms. *sigh* And math was a favourite subject...
>
> Trav"kinda wished he needed to use math more often, so the knowledge would stick"holt

Heh. That's kind of funny, because when I first set up the problem, I couldn't figure out how to solve for x when it was an exponent... Took me a minute to remember. :-)

The only aspects of logarithms that matter here are the exponent based issues. The rule that applies is that (log(x^y) = y*log(x)), so if you need to solve for a variable which is in the exponent, you take the logarithm of both sides of the equation, and the exponent pops out front as a coefficient. As for actually calculating the logarithm, I just use my calculator. I don't think I could explain any more than I just have about it, except for a discussion on the base of the logarithm (ln is base e, log implies base 10) but the base of the logarithm is irrelevant to this use of the function.

Don "Just woke up from a four hour nap, so I needed a little more math" Monkey