Thanks Audible: http://www.audible.com/numberphile More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓ Alex Bellos discusses slide rules and then the Halden Calculex, which he describes...
========== I want to talk about slide rules, this is
a slide rule, but to explain what it is So what we have is a classic old school Faber-Castell slide rule. Anyone who is over 50 or maybe over 60 would have had to learn to use
one of these at school and actually the use of mathematics for the previous
three hundred odd years required the use of this and you could say that every single
scientific invention oh you know through the age of enlightenment through the
nineteenth century and the 20th century would have relied at some level on ease of calculation through use of the slide rule and these are only a few out of the wide variety of problems that can be worked
with the standard slide rule this is what scientists had so it was shorthand for being a scientist and it...