ZitatHina Ohara, aged 7, adds up five very large numbers.
Hina is a pupil at the Urawa Soroban Academy in Urawa, Tokyo.
ZitatAn electronic calculator is a small, portable electronic device used to perform both basic and complex operations of arithmetic. In 2014, basic calculators can be very inexpensive. Scientific calculators tend to be higher-priced.
The first solid state electronic calculator was created in the 1960s, building on the extensive history of tools such as the abacus, developed around 2000 BC, and the mechanical calculator, developed in the 17th century. It was developed in parallel with the analog computers of the day.
Pocket sized devices became available in the 1970s, especially after the invention of the microprocessor developed by Intel for the Japanese calculator company Busicom.
Modern electronic calculators vary from cheap, give-away, credit-card-sized models to sturdy desktop models with built-in printers. They became popular in the mid-1970s as integrated circuits made their size and cost small. By the end of that decade, calculator prices had reduced to a point where a basic calculator was affordable to most and they became common in schools.
Computer operating systems as far back as early Unix have included interactive calculator programs such as dc and hoc, and calculator functions are included in almost all PDA-type devices (save a few dedicated address book and dictionary devices).
In addition to general purpose calculators, there are those designed for specific markets; for example, there are scientific calculators which include trigonometric and statistical calculations. Some calculators even have the ability to do computer algebra. Graphing calculators can be used to graph functions defined on the real line, or higher-dimensional Euclidean space.
In 1986, calculators still represented an estimated 41% of the world's general-purpose hardware capacity to compute information. This diminished to less than 0.05% by 2007.
ZitatThis originally came up from someone over on Calcverse. Now that I've watched back the video and given it some thought, I recall they were working with a formula on their TI Nspire, so they probably got the warning that a 0^0 had been changed to a one as well, which prompted the discussion and our original testing.
Another interesting thing that I forgot to record is, at the time, we found that the Android calculator showed "undefined or 1" as the result, while the Google.com calculator showed 1 when you searched "0^0". Google sheets also gave a result of 1. This is currently the case as well, though could change in the future. It would seem that there is no overarching mathematical ethos across all the divisions at Alphabet, at least at this time.
ZitatSome calculators say 6/2(1+2) = 1 and others say it equals 9 (similarly 8 divided by 2(2+2) can be 1 or 16 depending on the calculator). How did this disagreement on the order of operations come to be? My first PEMDAS video focused on how mathematicians, scientists and engineers interpret expressions; this video focuses on how calculators treat them. It turns out that the rule that juxtaposition comes before division is much older than "PEMDAS", and has been widely used for decades. So why did some calculator brands switch from this rule (which I call "PEJMDAS") to treating juxtaposition as the same priority level as division? And what can we do about the ambiguity?
ZitatWhen it comes to order of operations (PEMDAS, BODMAS, BEDMAS, BIDMAS), who are you going to believe: your primary school teacher, or Richard Feynman? Applying PEMDAS to the viral maths puzzle "6/2(1+2) = ?" gives the answer 9, as explained in videos by MindYourDecisions and others, but is that the whole story...