Calculate exponential growth trends
15 Apr 2020There has been a lot of talk about exponential growth the last few weeks, regarding the spread of COVID-19. It can be a tough concept to get your head around. If you hear “It doubles every week”, ok so that means what for next month? Times 8? Times 16? I wanted to make an easy calculate exponential (going up) and logarithmic (going down) phenomena.
Introducing the Exponential Growth Calculator! Just add two data points and let the tool extrapolate.
Some examples:
- Carbon-14 has a radioactive half-life of 5730 years (logarithmic decay)
- Growth of people infected by COVID-19 in the USA between 15 and 29 March 2020 (exponential growth)
- Social Media: Facebook grew from 1 mio MAU in 2004 to 2.32 bil in 2018 (exponential growth)
- Moore’s Law: number of transistors on a chip doubles every 2 years (1990-2010) (exponential growth)
- Business: month on month double digit growth = x 3.14 per year (exponential growth)
