Available as:
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PostScript
See also the Gresham web site.
Exciting handwriting recognition calculators — A series of exciting hands-on talks about calculators, past, present and future. (Cardiff University, Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, Swansea University, National Waterfront Museum, Glasgow University, many schools, etc)
Revolting Calculators — Calculators have been around for centuries, and they were one of the first handheld computerised gadgets. They are now to be found inside mobile phones, on desktop computers, even in wristwatches. This Lunch Hour Lecture will demonstrate, with participation, that current everyday calculators can easily give wrong and misleading answers. They also have surprising and severe mathematical problems, which can catch people out. They are much harder to use than they need be. The lecture reviews the straight-forward maths behind calculation and calculators, and thence provides a solution to the surprising range of problems identified. A calculator will be demonstrated and compared with commercial systems (which are all worse). The talk will be of interest to anyone who thought they had problems with calculators: they’ll be pleased to learn that it’s the calculators that have the problems! Please come with your own calculator. (UCL Lunch time lecture, January 2003; Oxford University Invariant Society, December 2002; Royal Institution, March 2002.)
From Henry Briggs to Modern Calculators — Henry Briggs, the first Gresham Professor of Geometry, developed what we now call common logarithms to make multiplication easier. Nowadays few of us use logarithms as hand-held calculators make everything much easier. But do they? This lecture will show how bad many current calculators are, and it will show how ideas in computing science can circumvent many of their problems. (Gresham College, November 2001.)
See also my earlier Gresham Lectures.
Available as:
Adobe PDF
PostScript
See also the Gresham web site.
Abstract
In the two decades hand-held calculators have been readily available there
has been ample time to develop a usable design and to educate the consumer
public into choosing quality devices. This article reviews a representative
calculator that is 'state of the art' and shows it has an execrable design.
The design is shown to be confusing and essentially non-mathematical. Substantial
evidence is presented that illustrates the inadequate documentation, bad
implementation, feature interaction, and feature incoherence. These problems
are shown to be typical of calculators generally. Despite the domain (arithmetic)
being well-defined, the design problems are profound, widespread, confusing
— and needless. Worrying questions are begged: about design quality control,
about consumer behaviour, and about the role of education — both at school
level (training children to acquiesce to bad design) and at university level
(training professionals to design unusable products). The article concludes
with recommendations.
Available as:
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PostScript
Abstract
Harold Thimbleby challenges the view that lifelong learning should equip
people to cope with an ever more complex world.
Available as:
HTML
Abstract
Henri Genaille's Rods are a nineteenth-century device for doing multiplication, similar to, but easier to use than, the more familiar Napier's Bones. Genaille's Rods are visually attractive and useful in teaching. This article shows how to use Mathematica to draw the required diagrams, which can then be cut out with scissors and passed to wooden rods to make an accurate set of rods.
Available as:
Adobe PDF
and as a Mathematica notebook (which also works well if you have the new Computational Document Format extension loaded in your browser).
Existing calculators are unreliable and difficult to use, and they are marketed misleadingly. A new calculator is described that is simple, reliable and very powerful.
Available as:
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PostScript
Abstract
Conventional calculators are badly designed: they suffer from bad computer
science — they are unnecessarily difficult to use and buggy. I describe
a solution, avoiding the problems caused by conventional calculators, one
that is more powerful and arguably much easier to use. The solution has
been implemented, and design issues are discussed.
This paper shows an interactive system that is declarative, with the advantages of clarity and power that entails. It frees people from working out how a calculation should be expressed to concentrating on what they want solved. An important contribution is to demonstrate the very serious problems users face when using conventional calculators, and hence what a freedom a declarative design brings.
See also original in the Computer Journal.
Available as:
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