“Better still learn mental math, you won’t always have an answer book in your pocket!” — 1500’s teachers
Comment on Banana for scale
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
When I learned the consistency (synergy?) between metric measures, I thought that was so amazing.
In the olden days sciencey types and engineers kept fact books listing such relations. They had a specific name that escapes me.
Before handheld calculators, they also kept books of pre-calculated mathematical operations, so they were used to having numbers books around.
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 3 days ago
historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Likely a “CRC”: CRC Standard Mathematical Tables, which is probably the same book as the pre-calculated mathematical operations you mentioned. It has a lot of good mathematical stuff in it such as basic formulas, trig functions, log tables, integral and differential functions, and formulas up through around Fourier analysis.
If we were doing that thought exercise where you can take a “go bag” back in time to build science up more quickly, a CRC and a slide rule would probably be in mine. I’d probably throw in a prism and as compact of a microscope that uses a mirror as a light source as I could get away with; both for showing small stuff living in water and for showing what couldn’t be manufactured yet (depending on when I went back). I wouldn’t waste space in the bag for anything dealing with the imperial system.