Laws of Logarithms

There are very few laws of logarithms that let us work with them very
effectively, despite the fact that logarithms are very hard to evaluate in
general.

Assume a > 0 is a (positive) real number.

• loga (x) = y means x = ay for real numbers x > 0 and y. So:
• loga (ax ) = x for every real number
• aloga (x) = x for every x > 0.

The combination of the last two statements says that logs and exponential
functions are inverse functions. However, you should be careful to keep track
of when x must be strictly positive, since no logarithm can be defined at
zero and the logarithm of a negative number is a complex number, which we
also won’t deal with.
The laws of exponents lead to the following laws of logarithms. Here we
assume x and y are positive real numbers.
1. loga (xy) = loga (x) + loga (y)
 
2. loga xy = loga (x) − loga (y)

3. loga (xr ) = r loga (x) for any real number r.

We will generally only care about the case when a = e, in which case
loga (x) = ln(x) is the natural logarithm. One excuse for only working with
this most important logarithm is the following “change of base formula” (for
a 6= 1)
ln(x)
loga (x) = .
ln(a)
For the natural log, the laws become:
1. ln(xy) = ln(x) + ln(y)
 
2. ln xy = ln(x) − ln(y)

3. ln(xr ) = r ln(x) for any real number r.

Also, the earlier statements become:

• ln(x) = y means x = ey for real numbers x > 0 and y.

• ln(ex ) = x for every real number
• eln(x) = x for every x > 0.

1
 One way we can use the laws is to collapse some large expression involving
several logs:
Example:

log3 (x + 5) + log3 (x − 5) − 4 log3 (2) = log3 (x2 − 25) − log3 (16)

 2 
x − 25
= log3
16

Another that will be very important later is really the opposite idea. We take
the natural log of a complicated expression and break it down into a number of
manageable pieces.
Example:

(x + 5)6 (x2 − 4)7

 
ln = ln(x + 5)6 + ln(x2 − 4)7 − ln(x3 − 5)8
(x3 − 5)8
= 6 ln(x + 5) + 7 ln(x2 − 4) − 8 ln(x3 − 5)