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I have some of the same experiences. Every older engineer would say "When I was in school we used slide rules" but no one would ever explain how they worked. Th
by sbradford26 8y ago
I have some of the same experiences. Every older engineer would say "When I was in school we used slide rules" but no one would ever explain how they worked. This article was great for finally clearing that up for me.
- perilunar 8y agoThis surprises me. I went to school after electronic calculators replaced slide rules (and books of log and trig tables), but we still learned how logarithms worked and that they were the principle behind slide rules.
- sbradford26 8y agoI graduated from college in 2016. We definitely covered logarithms but nobody really tied it back to slide rules. It definitely is a shame because understanding how problems were solved before can provide a lot of insight.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWe used log and trig tables in the 90s (UK) at a time when programmable graphing calculators were widely available.
- true_religion 8y agoWe learned about logarithms as well in the 2000s, but they never mentioned slide rules. Just lots of tables and charts to get a feel for it.