Remove the outer casing on the Monroe PC-1421, a 1964 mechanical calculator, and this is what you’ll find. Courtesy of Kevin Twomey Mark Glusker had heard rumors about the mechanical calculator, a ...

Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a ...

Everyone learns in grade school that you can’t divide by zero, but few of us ever learn (or fully understand) why. The stock answer is that it gives you an answer of infinity. The truth is a bit more ...

Before the electronic calculator, there was the mechanical calculator, a heavy device often about the size of a small computer that cost thousands in today’s dollars. They were indispensable tools ...

NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks to mathematician Eugenia Cheng about the Pascaline — a 17th-century invention credited as the first mechanical calculator. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician, a scientist, a ...

From early on in math class, you’re taught that you cannot divide a number by zero. On paper, it doesn’t work out. Do it electronically, and you’ll get an error ...

I was just in an email ‘conversation’ with someone when I mentioned my Curta mechanical calculator, and he responded “Pictures Please!” so here we are… Just in case you haven’t heard about this before ...

I first learned about the Curta from this January 2004 article in Scientific American, by Cliff Stoll. Unfortunately, the article is not available for free. But you can purchase a PDF of the whole Jan ...

This chaos of churning gears comes down to a fairly simple explanation. Division is just a series of sequential subtraction, and division by zero is the sequential subtraction of zero, over and over ...