In second grade (I was eight years old that year), my teacher informed us that we would be memorizing "the times tables" from 1x1 to 12x12 that year. I missed the "that year" part and thought we needed to know them that week! I wrote out each set of numbers carefully and fell asleep that night memorizing them. I still remember having to count up from 7x7=49 to 7x8=56 several times. For some reason, 7x8 just wouldn't stick in my memory. But I succeeded! I memorized them all... and spent the rest of the year during math times bored out of my skull. I think. Second grade memories have gotten a bit fuzzy.
A few years ago I decided I wanted to memorize logarithms (in base 10) as well. Only... the pattern was even less sticky than the times tables. I just couldn't seem to get the numbers to stick in my head.
However, I had enjoyed playing a history game at grocery stores. When paying cash, if I got less than $20 in change, I would try to treat the number as a year and see if I could remember anything that happened that year. So $10.00 became the year 1000 A.D. (or C.E. if you prefer) and I would remember that was the year Leif Erikson got blown off course and landed in Vinland. $19.28 became 1928, the year the stock market crash began the Great Depression.
I noticed that if I multiplied the logarithms by 1000, I got something that looked like a date. 1000xLog(7) becomes the year 845, and 1000xLog(11) become the year 1041. I began looking up events that happened in these years, trying to get the numbers to stick in my head. I'll post what I've found here in a series of "Log of History" posts. Maybe treating these numbers as dates will help someone else remember the logarithms too!
