Why Logarithmic scale? - SoojungHong/StatisticalMind GitHub Wiki

logarithms have a few specific properties that are quite useful in their own right:

• Logarithms are a convenient way to express large numbers. (The base-10 logarithm of a number is roughly the number of digits in that number, for example.)

• Slide rules work because adding and subtracting logarithms is equivalent to multiplication and division. (This benefit is slightly less important today.)

• Lots of things "decay logarithmically". For example, hot objects cool down, cold objects warm up. Things in motion experience friction and drag and gradually slow down.

• If you can take a problem and split it into two smaller problems that can be solved independently, you can probably write a computer program where the number of steps required to solve the problem is "logarithmic". That is, the time taken depends on the logarithm of the amount of data to be processed.