I remember those large teaching slide-rules, but haven't seen one in decades. Great to know they still exist, if only as mysterious artifacts from the dark ages.
Neither of my parents were mathematically inclined, but they were content to let me forage for information on my own, with lots of trips to the library. Amazing how clear are my 50-year-old memories of 10-year-old me sitting on the floor with a trig book, drawing random triangles on paper, measuring them as carefully as I could with ruler and protractor, and verifying the law of sines and cosines with paper and slide-rule. God, I was such a nerd. Paid off well in the end, though :-)
Now I'm retired, and for fun, I work my way through the problems at Project Euler. Four years in, and only two more problems to go to hit 90% complete! It'll probably take me another year+ to finish them all (hopefully).
We end up doing a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations for various odds-and-ends. I keep a 4’ long teaching slide-rule next to my desk for this purpose. New employees are befuddled. Everyone else just accepts it as a fact-of-life when asking for my help.
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I remember those large teaching slide-rules, but haven't seen one in decades. Great to know they still exist, if only as mysterious artifacts from the dark ages.
Neither of my parents were mathematically inclined, but they were content to let me forage for information on my own, with lots of trips to the library. Amazing how clear are my 50-year-old memories of 10-year-old me sitting on the floor with a trig book, drawing random triangles on paper, measuring them as carefully as I could with ruler and protractor, and verifying the law of sines and cosines with paper and slide-rule. God, I was such a nerd. Paid off well in the end, though :-)
Now I'm retired, and for fun, I work my way through the problems at Project Euler. Four years in, and only two more problems to go to hit 90% complete! It'll probably take me another year+ to finish them all (hopefully).
We end up doing a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations for various odds-and-ends. I keep a 4’ long teaching slide-rule next to my desk for this purpose. New employees are befuddled. Everyone else just accepts it as a fact-of-life when asking for my help.