In this chapter we are going to look at exponential and logarithm functions.  Both of these functions are very important and need to be understood by anyone who is going on to later math courses.  These functions also have applications in science, engineering, and business to name a few areas.  In fact, these functions can show up in just about any field that uses even a small degree of mathematics.

Many students find these to be difficult functions to deal with, especially logarithms.  This is probably because they are so different from any of the other functions that they’ve looked at to this point and logarithms use a notation that will be new to almost everyone in an algebra class.  However, you will find that once you get past the notation and start to understand some of their properties they really aren’t too bad.

Here is a listing of the topics covered in this chapter.

Exponential Functions  In this section we will introduce exponential functions.  We will be taking a look at some of the properties of exponential functions.

Logarithm Functions  Here we will introduce logarithm functions.  We be looking at how to evaluate logarithms as well as the properties of logarithms.

Solving Exponential Equations  We will be solving equations that contain exponentials in this section.

Solving Logarithm Equations  Here we will solve equations that contain logarithms.

Applications  In this section we will look at a couple of applications of exponential functions and an application of logarithms.