Many studies in the history of science literature have evaluated the introduction of new science into non-European societies within a limited perspective. This process has been generally called as “transfer” or “reception” which mainly implies that non-European societies were passive and that their only function was to transfer new knowledge with no regard to their local contexts. Studies that have been made so far tend to disregard the multi-directional and complex patterns of this process and ignore the historical, political and social backgrounds and implications of it. In this talk, I will focus on the introduction of logarithms invented in Europe in the seventeenth century, into the Ottoman Empire as an example. Based on an analysis of the Sharhu Cadavil-i Al- Ansab (Explanations of the Tables of Logarithms), by Ismail Gelenbevi, one of the leading mathematicians in the Ottoman Naval Engineering School in the eighteenth century, on logarithms, I will argue that Ottoman encounter with new science in general and logarithms in particular was an active process which affected and was affected by the contemporary Ottoman scientific and social discourses. In this respect, I will discuss the political, social and intellectual implications of the appropriation of logarithms by Ottoman scientists and thereby show how investigating the transfer of certain mathematical concepts can reveal the dynamics of the process of transfer from Europen to non-European societies itself and thereby prove an important tool for historiography in general.