"In the seventeenth century, perhaps the greatest of all for the development of mathematics, there appeared a work which in the history of British science can be place second only to Sir Isaac Newton's monumental Pincipia. In 1614, John Napier of Merchiston issued his Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, ("A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithms"), the first treatise on logarithms. To Napier, who also invented the decimal point, we are indebted for an invention which is as important to mathematics as Arabic numerals, the concept of zero, and the principle of positional notation. Without these, mathematics would probably not have advanced much beyond the stage to which it had been brought two thousand years ago. Without logarithms the computations accomplished daily with ease by every mathematical tyro would tax the energies of the greatest mathematicians."
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Original Language: English
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Edward Kasner, James R. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination (1940)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/History_of_logarithms
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History of logarithms
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