• Journal for History of Mathematics
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.409-419
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• 2014

In school mathematics, the logarithmic function is defined as the inverse function of an exponential function. And the natural logarithm is defined by the integral of the fractional function 1/x. But historically, Napier had already used the concept of logarithm in 1614 before the use of exponential function or integral. The calculation of the logarithm was a hard work. So mathematicians with arithmetic ability made the tables of values of logarithms and people used the tables for the estimation of data. In this paper, we first take a look at the mathematicians and mathematical principles related to the appearance and the developments of the logarithmic tables. And then we deal with the confusions between mathematicians, raised by the estimation data which were known as proportional parts or mean differences in common logarithmic tables.