Napier published his discussion of logarithms in 1614 in a brochure entitled Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (A Descriptio of the Wonderful Law of Logarithms). The work contains a table giving the logarithms of the sines of angles for successive minutes of arc. The Descriptio roused immediate and widespread interest, and in the year following its publication Henry Briggs (1561-1631), professor of geometry at Gresham College in London, and later professor at Oxford, traveled to Edinburgh to pay his respects to the great inventor of logarithms. It was upon this visit that both Napier and Briggs agreed that the tables would be more useful if they were altered so that the logarithm of 1 would be 0 and the logarithm of 10 would be an appropriate power of 10. Thus were born the so-called Briggsian, or common, logarithms of today . Logarithms of this sort, which are essentially logarithms to the base 10, owe their superior utility in numerical computations to the fact that our number system also is based on 10. For a number system having some other base b it would, of course, be most convenient for computational purposes to have tables of logarithms also to the base b.