In mathematics, the geometric mean (also known as the mean proportional) is a mean or average which indicates a central tendency of a finite collection of positive real numbers by using the product of their values (as opposed to the arithmetic mean, which uses their sum). The geometric mean of numbers is the nth root of their product, i.e., for a collection of numbers a1, a2, ..., an, the geometric mean is defined as
When the collection of numbers and their geometric mean are plotted in logarithmic scale, the geometric mean is transformed into an arithmetic mean, so the geometric mean can equivalently be calculated by taking the natural logarithm of each number, finding the arithmetic mean of the logarithms, and then returning the result to linear scale using the exponential function ,