Is there any point in keeping a scientific calculator these days?

[TeacupTurtle]

Remember these - back in the day? Having a clear-out of the junk drawer & I came across my old school calculator.. It's over 3 decades old!! but is still in perfect working order. I can't see any point in keeping it can you? These days if we need to work something out we just use our phones. My kids never wanted it. I can remember our old maths teacher insisting we 'invest' in a good quality calculator that could do logarithms & would 'last a lifetime'... Well yup, here it is, 'lasting' ok, but we have no need of it. Honestly, when was the last time any of us was caught short needing to work out a logarithm in real life? Shall I dump it in the charity shop?

But Fermats, that's not full-on reverse Polish. That means a calculator where to add 3 and 4, you write 3 4 +, ie operations with two inputs are performed with the inputs entered first, whereas the OP shows a Casio where you would type 3 + 4. (I do agree that you would type 60 [sin] ).

I think my friend at school had a proper RPN calculator. I've never seen one since. (This friend went on to study Maths at Cambridge and is now a Yale professor so he was a bit exceptional).

Just remembered, the digital mileometer on my car was showing 80008 on the way home today, and all I could think was BOOOB!

Loving the juxtaposition between the maths/calculator geek chat on one hand and BOOBIES on the other

YouBumder - I guess when I was a teenage boy I was first developing what's turned out to be a lifetime interest in both topics.

I win with my 30 year old graphing calculator. First one available to the public!

This beauty must be 25 years old. You can write programs, solve equations, matrices, analyse datasets, plot lines of best fit...

Oh and it turned on having sat on the shelf for a long time.

Standard expectation for a secondary school student to have a scientific calculator.

We use ours every now and again

This is my TI Galaxy 67. I bought it August 1993 to start teacher training as I had dropped my older version (which I had since 1983) down one too many flights of stairs. I love the side by style, I keep this one safe. My newest calculator is only 3 weeks old.

Eeeeee, that's brought back some memories........namely using our calculators to spell words such as ' boobless '

Egged on by our maths teacher of all people 😂😂😂

I still use one at work!

That's true, Daddaddad - full on Polish (where the scoping is entirely down to operator order and no brackets at all are needed) is a thing of intellectual beauty but fuck all practical use!

However, I still like to press 6 then 0 then sin in that order.

I'm doing a biology degree and use a scientific calculator every day.

@noble I've got that one! The screen is smashed but I can't bring myself to chuck it!

If anyone thinks of getting rid of one, take it to a charity shop. There are children that can't afford them so they'll be gratefully received.

I’m doing a maths and physics degree and couldn’t be without one. In fact I have about four or five in various bags and locations and I always take two to an exam in case one breaks. I can’t have too fancy a model though - any graphing functionalities etc wouldn’t be allowed in exam conditions

For those of you wondering what you might do with a log function, here's one idea: working out doubling times.

eg if the world's population is growing at 3%pa, how long will it take to double? enter log(2) / log(1.03) = 23.4 years (just one generation ).

Credit card charging 18.3% interest? debt will double in log(2) / log(1.183) = 4.1 years!