What does the ln mean here?
It's from this page.
Finally, what could I have done to find out for myself? (What did I miss?) I know so little I can even tag the question!
Just because it might be useful for someone working on database identifiers, here's the code I ended up with.
public static double HappyBirthday(double charCount, double keyLength = 9) { // Computes the number of IDs that would need to exist in a set // before there's a 50% chance of a collision. const double chanceOfCollision = 0.5; double spaceLength = Math.Pow(charCount, keyLength); var spacesConsumed = Math.Sqrt(2 * spaceLength * Math.Log(1 / (1 - chanceOfCollision))); return spacesConsumed; }1 Answer
$\begingroup$It is the natural logarithm. It is defined as$$\ln x =\log_e x$$Where $e$ is the Euler's number, defined as$$e=\sum_{k\geq 0}\frac{1}{k!}=\lim_{n\to\infty}\left(1+\frac{1}{n}\right)^n$$ Sometimes l looks like $1$ in Calibri font.
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