"Early in the 1660s, a pair of mathematicians from the British Isles, John Napier and Henry Briggs, jointly introduced, perfected, and exploited the "logarithm," a concept having tremendous practical and theoretical significance. Logarithms have the remarkable property of simplifying such otherwise tedious computations as multiplication, division, and the extraction of roots so that no scientist of sound mind would thereafter go about finding \sqrt[7]{234.65} without the benefit of logarithms."