On 12/27/2010 11:35 PM, Steve B wrote:
"Steve wrote in message
...
My first electronic calculator in the early seventies was over $35 and
all it could do was add, multiply, subtract and devide - if you could
keep batteries in it.

Today a $2 calculator will run for a couple years on a battery, do
square roots, metric conversions, etc and has 2 or 3 memories.
A $30 calculator is a full programmable scientific calculator with a
solar cell and a battery you never need to replace.

IIRC, I paid about $2 for a plastic slide rule in high school, from 62 to
66. A Pickett, which I still have, with the leather case was about $12.
How much would a $12 slide rule cost today adjusted for all the things it
needs to be adjusted for?

Far more than graphing calculator that would do calculus, if my guess is
right.

Steve

Found it, and a $12 item would cost $78 today. Still, with a slide rule,
you had to have an idea of what the answer would be, as they did not provide
decimal places in most cases, unless the value was less than one on the
scale. Interpolation was key.

For other uses, see Interpolation (disambiguation).
In the mathematical subfield of numerical analysis, interpolation is a
method of constructing new data points within the range of a discrete set of
known data points.

In engineering and science one often has a number of data points, as
obtained by sampling or experimentation, and tries to construct a function
which closely fits those data points. This is called curve fitting or
regression analysis. Interpolation is a specific case of curve fitting, in
which the function must go exactly through the data points.

A different problem which is closely related to interpolation is the
approximation of a complicated function by a simple function. Suppose we
know the function but it is too complex to evaluate efficiently. Then we
could pick a few known data points from the complicated function, creating a
lookup table, and try to interpolate those data points to construct a
simpler function. Of course, when using the simple function to calculate new
data points we usually do not receive the same result as when using the
original function, but depending on the problem domain and the interpolation
method used the gain in simplicity might offset the error.

It should be mentioned that there is another very different kind of
interpolation in mathematics, namely the "interpolation of operators". The
classical results about interpolation of operators are the Riesz-Thorin
theorem and the Marcinkiewicz theorem. There are also many other subsequent
results.

Steve



Heck, slide rules got us to the Moon. :-)

TDD