Before there were apps for tablets and smartphones, before mathematics education software was easily installed on personal computers, before electronic calculators entered professional practice and ...

You may remember that I collect slide rules. If you don’t, it probably doesn’t surprise you. I have a large number of what I think of as normal slide rules. I also have the less common circular and ...

The slide rule, sometimes called a slipstick, was a type of mechanical analog computer. It was and still is, used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as roots, ...

THE author makes his title, “Quick and Easy Methods of Calculating”—at least, that is all that is in large print on the title-page; but the binder calls it, on the outside of the book, “The Slide-Rule ...

The protractor and the Bunsen burner. Playing the recorder in music class. Drawing arcs and circles with a compass in geometry. These tools of the education trade become part of our lives for a ...

You may find this hard to believe, but there are people still alive today who once did their mathematical calculations by sliding sticks back and forth. No keypads, no batteries, no LEDs. Just sticks.

For about 350 years, humanity’s most innovative handheld computer was something called a slide rule. As typewriters once symbolized the writer, slide rules symbolized the engineer. These analog ...

A regular slide rule takes advantage of the fact that you can multiply and divide by adding logarithms. Imagine having two rulers marked in inches or centimeters — it doesn’t matter (see the adjoining ...