Fun With Logarithms

Base 2 logarithms come up everywhere in this class.

Some characterizations of :

• The number of times we can divide n by 2 before we get 1 or less.
• The number of bits in the binary representation of n.
• A way to turn multiplication into addition: .
• The inverse function of .

The function grows much more slowly than n or 1/100 n or even .

The book lists a bunch of amazing properties of this function. I'll introduce them as needed.