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Are you sure that it doesn't teach you anything? Somehow the students of "old math" were able to put a man on the Moon.

• boomboomsubban 9y ago
  So you're advocating the return of the slide rule? As that's what was used for most calculating, the "old math" method being too cumbersome for such large problems.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    As someone who actually learned to use a slide rule before pocket calculators became available, that's probably not the best example. Slide rules were good for getting "[EDITED: precise not accurate] enough" results in various situations where they could do so more quickly than solving by hand. You still needed to understand orders of magnitude, precision, and generally having a feel for numbers to use one. Note also that a lot of calculations on the Apollo program were actually done in part by hand by human "computers." There was even a whole movie about it a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
    • boomboomsubban 9y ago
      Those human computers used slide rules, as even with them the problems were so ridiculously complex they took months. Their were many different slide rules with varying degrees of precision https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/home/calculate_feature_k4.html https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/home/calculate...
• watwut 9y ago
  Only a fraction of them. And those of their generation who were that good talked about math as something to be understood rather then memorized.