Musical logarithms in the seventeenth century: Descartes, Mercator, Newton

This paper describes three previously little-studied sources from the 17th century, which reveal early uses of logarithms in the mathematical study of music. It describes the problem, which had existed since antiquity, of providing quantitative measures for the relationships between musical intervals when the latter were defined by identification with mathematical ratios; and it shows how this problem was solved by Descartes, Newton, and Nicolaus Mercator in the mid-17th century by using logarithms to provide "measures" of intervals, which could then be compared with one another. It discusses the composition and interrelationships of the manuscript sources for this work. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved