One of the most common student mistakes with logarithms is thinking that
.
When I first started my career, I referred to this as the Third Classic Blunder. The first classic blunder, of course, is getting into a major land war in Asia. The second classic blunder is getting into a battle of wits with a Sicilian when death is on the line. And the third classic blunder is thinking that somehow simplfies as
.
Sadly, as the years pass, fewer and fewer students immediately get the cultural reference. On the bright side, it’s also an opportunity to introduce a new generation to one of the great cinematic masterpieces of all time.
One of my colleagues calls this mistake the Universal Distributive Law, where the distributes just as if
was being multiplied by a constant. Other mistakes in this vein include
and
.
Along the same lines, other classic blunders are thinking that
simplifies as
and that
simplifies as
.
I’m continually amazed at the number of good students who intellectually know that the above equations are false but panic and use them when solving a problem.
5 thoughts on “Laws of Logarithms”