How's Your Spelling?

That's a bit too deep for a peasant like me. His blackboard appeared covered in massive equations (the one's his wife did i guess lol).. I only did half reasonable with trigonometry because i found angles interesting. We had to get out logarithm tables.
These days it just takes a few buttons on a calculator. I always thought how clever whoever the mathematicians were that originally produced the tables.

 

If a members post has a few spelling mistakes so what, if you can read and understand the post then surely that what matters.

Roll on Spring, oh and a couple of Vaccine shots.

 

Who else had to Google Soroban?

 

I went to a 'Secondary modern' school.. where all the eleven plus failures went.
It was adjacent to a large rough council estate where i lived.
However all the kids came out of that school with a half decent reading and writing ability. That was simply down to the particular lady English teacher. She was marvellous and all of us liked and respected her.
When i read of pupils in inner city schools leaving at 16 years old unable to write i can't help wonder what go's on these days.
It's the system that must be wrong, not the kids

 

God, you were posh shiney having a cave, all we had was an old Potato Sack

 

Totally off topic in off topic, the evolution of maths tools is amazing.

I was born in 1971, and we still had an abacus in the classroom even though the modern method of "groups" whilst listening to Mozart was preferred. Tests included a section of quick paced calculations "in your head" and multiplication tables were learnt by heart.

We still had my Dad's old Slide rule for emergencies at home. Calculators were introduced early on, but the first big change was in early 80s when the requirement was to have a pocket calculator with Functions . Wow. Sin and Cosin with a press of a button!

When doing my engineering and other techie stuff learning I was made to buy a programmable pocket calculator that actually drew graphs! Something like this

Then I swapped countries and ended up in a world that had no means to access fancy calculators like that and to my amazement, it was normal to go to check logarithms or extrapolation stuff in the books lining the shelves of the classroom. The tools to solve a very complex integral were paper and a pencil. This was in the late 90s.

I have never enjoyed maths more, and still like to dwaddle calculations on paper rather than automating it as it gives the feeling of being in control and seeing where the end result is heading.

Then the pace increased and Excel, Mathlab and various other platforms completely swept out not just paper, pen and reference books, but also pocket calculators.

Now the speed of evolution is so great that every week brings up a new feature to do the calculation for you in your preferred colour.

I kind of miss the paper-and-pen integrals and equations, so am a big fan of killer sudokus and the sort. At work I try to follow the times and just accept that in order to do a complex set of calculations I'm no longer asked to write a function, but merely to choose if I'd like the end result to be in pink/ blue/ other(please specify) font.

This is all within my generation, goodness knows where we are heading. The beauty of toying with numbers on paper is lost forever I fear, but amazing evolution is opening a lot of doors. Go, numbers, go!

 

Exactly- that's also a lost art. When you are building and following the journey of an calculation, it's easy to spot if something obvious is not right. When aiming just for the result, any errors would be a non- instructive message such as !ErrDIVby0! and you have to work back to see if a parenthesis is missing.

Just getting the result is dangerous because the perspective may not be there. A colleague of mine caused a bit of a stir when submitting her Hungarian budget and failed to realise that the currency convertion was not on. 1000 HUF is about 3.40 USD. The end number just popped out of her Excel file and off it was sent. Our budget manager is all right now and will regain the full use of his limbs eventually

 

We were taught estimating to see if the number you calculated looked right. If it didn't the first thing to check was units was everything either metric or imperial, had you got all the decimal places right etc. Also at infant school got a thorough knowledge of times tables.
My younger colleagues are "disconcerted" when I look at a calculation and tell them it's wrong and should be about so and so without reaching for a calculator.

 

Meeeee!

 

I don't think I've ever been on a forum where members have become such pedants about spelling causing upset and falling out.
Sorry if it's happened to you @Mike Allen, or anyone else.
I make frequent mistakes, usually typos (can you spot one in my post of the other day?), but no one here made an issue of it.
I never notice errors, by others or me. It doesn't matter anyway.
What does, is the person who is generously giving their time, wisdom and kindness to post... there are examples here over and over again, day in, day out.
Bless you all for such comradeship. It's a gem of a place.