Where did the word logarithm come from? Any relation to the word algorithm?
Where did the word "logarithm" come from?
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$\begingroup$
terminology
logarithms
math-history
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2A great opportunity to make people aware of our sister site [English Language and Usage](http://english.stackexchange.com/) that has a dedicated tag for [etymology questions](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/etymology?sort=votes&pagesize=30). – 2011-05-08
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0I'm leaving this as a comment instead: http://jeff560.tripod.com/l.html – 2011-05-08
1 Answers
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There is no relation between the two words.
logarithm: 1610s, Mod.L. logarithmus, coined by Scottish mathematician John Napier (1550-1617), lit. "ratio-number," from Gk. logos "proportion, ratio, word"
algorithm: was derived from the name of 8th century Persian mathematcian al-Kwarizmi.
Note: I think it's unusual for a term to derive from a person's name, especially in mathematics. I know words like "bowdlerize" (meaning to edit by removing offensive material) from Thomas Bowdler, or a "spoonerism" (a phrase constructed by exchanging syllables between words, eg "Swell foop") named after William Spooner, but in math I believe it's quite rare. The now-standard lowercase "abelian" is perhaps another example.
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0Is there any reason it's called a logarithm and not something else? Now I'm curious. – 2011-05-08
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3This: http://www.pballew.net/arithme1.html seems to agree. – 2011-05-08
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0@Moron You link was very clarifying. Thank you. – 2011-05-08
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14Well, besides abelian, there's Noetherian, Artinian, Gaussian, Riemannian, Jacobian, Laplacian, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, d'Alembertian, Eulerian, Lorentzian, Dedekind (as in domain), Hilbert (as in scheme), Jacobson (as in ring)... – 2011-05-08
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0I suspect the syntactic similarity between "logarithm" and "algorithm" comes from a Latinisation of the latter name on the part of the scholars who adopted the word. – 2011-05-08
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2@Qiaochu: Note that I was requiring that the word be accepted as "elevated" to lowercase usage in order to sufficiently divorce it from its origin as a proper noun. Both "algorithm" and (often) "abelian" enjoy this status. – 2011-05-08
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1[That reminds me...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4526) – 2011-05-08
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0And also on [MO](http://mathoverflow.net/questions/44946/why-is-abelian-infrequently-capitalized). – 2011-05-08
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0All is there on Google. Logos to logarithm and whatever. – 2015-10-05