Calculate exponential growth trends15 Apr 2020
There has been a lot of talk about exponential growth the last few weeks, regarding the spread of COVID-19. It can be a tough concept to get your head around. If you hear “It doubles every week”, ok so that means what for next month? Times 8? Times 16? I wanted to make an easy calculate exponential (going up) and logarithmic (going down) phenomena.
Introducing the Exponential Growth Calculator! Just add two data points and let the tool extrapolate.
- Carbon-14 has a radioactive half-life of 5730 years (logarithmic decay)
- Growth of people infected by COVID-19 in the USA between 15 and 29 March 2020 (exponential growth)
- Social Media: Facebook grew from 1 mio MAU in 2004 to 2.32 bil in 2018 (exponential growth)
- Moore’s Law: number of transistors on a chip doubles every 2 years (1990-2010) (exponential growth)
- Business: month on month double digit growth = x 3.14 per year (exponential growth)