tends to be difficult to optimize with you don't have that show up it's much nicer behaved and so by taking the log you get something numerically easier to work with just as well as often analytically easier to work with we always talked about convex problems which are problems shaped like this and those are easy to minimize well these are concave problems in this case they're easy to maximize the same thing same algorithms can be applied guaranteed to find the one maximum that exists for this thing it was a question