Although John Napier was regarded as the inventor of logarithms, one could also argue that logarithms are simply a result of prior knowledge that has accumulated over centuries. There were several predecessors to logarithms, such as the quarter square multiplication algorithm, a table to calculate the power of multiplications and other things that served a similar purpose. Napier was the one who compiled the rules of logarithms, so it is not accurate to state that he invented the logarithms.