The most impractical calculator in the world only has two buttons
Scientific American · Manon Bischoff ·
Modern calculators have many buttons, including ones for sine, square root, pi and exponents. But it’s possible just two could suffice
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In the past, calculating complex values such as the logarithm of a number required a great deal of time and patience, as well as the appropriate reference material. This work, though sometimes tedious, led to unexpected discoveries. For example, while leafing through tables of logarithms, astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed that the pages for values starting with the digit 1 were significantly more worn than the others. This observation ultimately led to the so-called Benford’s law, which describes how certain random numbers are distributed.
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