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I used to be able to do logarithms in my head, not to arbitrary precision though, I'd just get 2 or 3 decimal places. Square roots, same thing, take enough mat
by com2kid 4y ago
I used to be able to do logarithms in my head, not to arbitrary precision though, I'd just get 2 or 3 decimal places.
Square roots, same thing, take enough math classes and don't use a calculator to do the arithmetic, and after a few quarters you can get down to a couple of digits pretty easily.
- gumby 4y agoIf you used a slide rule you got a feel for what the answer will be, so in that case this guy's skill might be less than a superpower and more like good intuition. More likely though that case would not apply as slide rules have been dead for half a century. I'm not old enough to have used a slide rule "professionally" (i.e. for work or even school) but I did use my dad's old engineering slide rule for a while in high school physics out of sheer orneriness and desire to be weird. Once I got used to it I often had the answer (to a decimal place or two) faster than my classmates using calculators, when doing problems as the teacher was working them out on the board in class. Of course I had some advantages they did not, for example I only needed one or two digits of significance for problems like that, and if I got the power of 10 wrong it was immediately obvious.