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Does anyone know how they calculated these logarithmic tables back then? Did they use any form of mechanical calculator, abacus, counting table, lookup tables o
by jernfrost 9y ago
Does anyone know how they calculated these logarithmic tables back then? Did they use any form of mechanical calculator, abacus, counting table, lookup tables or any other form of aid?
Or did they simply write in out by hand on paper like on is usually taught in elementary school?
- AstralStorm 9y agoDepends on the author. There were plenty of subtly wrong tables back in the day. These were often evaluated as Newton approximation, Taylor expansion or direct series if it converged fast enough.
- AstralStorm 9y agoAs a minor point I forgot to mention yesterday, Napier's logarithm was a different function from modern logarithm but satisfies many log laws in a wary. Additionally the first accurate multiplication algorithm faster than long multiplication has only been devised in XX century - Karatsuba's. Abacus is just a mechanical tool that represents long addition and multiplication.