At least in the northeast US, ln(x) was the preferred nomenclature as to eliminate ambiguity. Again, it depends on what course you were taking. Lg and Ln. Log w

At least in the northeast US, ln(x) was the preferred nomenclature as to eliminate ambiguity. Again, it depends on what course you were taking. Lg and Ln. Log was explicitly avoided. In higher mathematics, f^-1 does not mean the inverse of a function, unless that function is injective. Most people are aware of that at that point, but it's still a mental hurdle you have to unlearn and can lead to dangerous composition errors. (Edit: since I can't respond to you, poster below me, I mean the latter of course) Historically, in yore days of sextants, slide rules and log tables, engineers could "lift" multiplication into addition with said log tables which were of convention base 10. For anyone who wasn't a peer in the Royal Society or a professor, that's how complicated math calculations were performed. Banks balanced books and calculated interest payments via tables like this, and the precision of your log tables had a mantissa (the original floating point error, heh).