📶 History of Logarithms

This present work is part of Beauty and Truth, an aspiration
of mine for several years, ever since I began to think and dream about
a more special book linking art and mathematics.

Being passionate about painting, since I was little, I would
doodle animals from Zoology, Indians, and islands when I started
reading Robinson Crusoe, and later I was melting for Winnetou
movies. This inclination and pleasure for the arts made me love
beauty, and I dreamed of becoming a painter, for I had Maestro
Donici, my uncle, as a model, who would take me with him to
landscapes and painted my portrait when I was just a few years old.
My mother would praise me to all visitors and delight in my charcoal
sketches or watercolors, and later with the oil paintings found in my
Uncle Sandi-Donici's abandoned studio.

The pursuit of beauty, old albums, and my father's Larousse
fascinated and always followed me. With mathematics, it was harder,
because I learned it with difficulty; my older brothers forced me with
boring lessons and threats if I didn't do my duty at school... slowly,
by hook or by crook, I caught on to algebra and geometry, which were
necessary for admissions. Gheba's books with endless sausages of
fractions, algebras from the Russians, mathematical gazettes, and
later “Țițeica's geometry knocked on the door, and I savored them
one by one... I became the best in class, then at the Olympiads... The
painter's dream vanished, for the communists had changed the
purpose and destiny of art; times pushed me towards Architecture,
and I began a desperate effort to teach myself projective-affine and
descriptive geometry introduced by the French (Gaspard Monge)
during Napoleon's time.

The beauty in drawings went hand in hand with affine
geometry, and conics with sections and areas were the passion of my
high school years. That's how my interest in sectioned and rotated
bodies in perspectives, regular polyhedra, and the golden ratio
emerged. I gathered all these into my educational pouch, and they
walked hand in hand, art with geometry and algebra, like two sisters
who still accompany me now that I have silver threads and a beard
sparkling with dew.

My motivation and passion for beauty and mathematics later
found themselves intertwined with a thirst and hunger for Truth,
which I rediscovered in the Scriptures, the divine Word. By receiving
Jesus as Lord and Savior, I reoriented my preferences, and my vision
towards aesthetics and science was shaped by the divine breath I
found in the Word of the Lord.

How to combine Beauty with Truth? This is a challenge I try
to answer through my recent writings. These two divine traits are
found in perfect Harmony, in the person of the Lord, and they pierce
through all the pages of Scripture. The Psalms, the ancient book of
Job, Moses and David, as master builders, the poems in the Song of
Songs, and the depth of Proverbs, wander through the pages of
Scripture and amaze me daily as I ponder their beauty.
In my writings, I started from measures and proportions,
which define limits and boundaries; I sought measures, fractions in
the Bible, and found them in the magical dimensions of Moses'
Tabernacle and Solomon's Temple. I was fascinated by the
harmonious growth of spirals and found them in normal Christian
life, described again and again in the Gospels. The Spira Mirabilis and
logarithms define these two growths, arithmetic (moment by
moment, hour by hour, year by year...) and geometric (always,
always, exponential, harmonious), just like the body and all its
members likened to the Church—the Bride or the Temple of the
Spirit.

Logos-arithmos, as John Napier called them, the proportion
of numbers, were born four centuries ago, and a few daring souls,
Bürgi and Briggs, devout and pious men, were enlightened by the
Lord with skill, understanding, and discoveries that saved humanity.
The invention of logarithms, the calculating rule, and then
the binary system led to progress, and calculations were simplified in
all fields. These heroes of mathematical Truth, found in the
subdivisions of ONE, were at the same time God-fearing and devout
and loved the Lord. My humble and modest writings bring forth
unearthed treasures, forgotten in the dust of time and asleep in the
mists of history.

Who still knows about logarithms? We, of later times, caught
times of grace and special times when algebra and logarithms were
studied in schools. Now their tables, and sine and cosine, and powers
are in every pocket, and no one appreciates them anymore. Should
we forget the aspirations of these great daring men who for decades
toiled in calculations with 20 decimal places, working hard by
candlelight? They sacrificed themselves in the realm of Wisdom and
Understanding, and their toil pours forth even today in blessings that
ascend to heaven.

May readers continue my thoughts and find the same
Wellspring from which Beauty and Truth go hand in hand, our Lord
and Savior of the world.

Motto:
your lips.
Ps 45:3 You are the most handsome of men; grace is poured upon

John 14:7
Jesus said, "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life."

(Pavy Beloiu, United States, 2023)