September 30, 2011
While cleaning-up my study, I found my old tables of logarithms and anti-logarithms that must date to my high-school days.
For my readers who were too young to have had the privilege of using logarithm tables, Tony Audsley gives a good explanation, and the tables themselves are available on the next page. Used properly, the tables give logarithms and anti-logarithms (mantissa) to four places after the decimal point, with an error no greater than 1 in the last digit; you have to figure out the exponents (characteristic) yourself, by inspection.
Your task is to write programs that create four-place tables of logarithms and anti-logarithms; please let us know by leaving a comment if you remember using such tables in the past. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.