Calculator Museums

http://datamath.org/

There are a few wonderful websites online that show the history of calculators. I am very partial to Casio myself, but the Data Math Museum of Calculators has some very interesting history related to the TI series. Also, for those of you who grew up in the United States, one might remember the Little Professor calculator. This was often used by children for their first calculator. I had one as a kid and they are quite the collectors item today.

http://www.mrmartinweb.com/calculator.html

Another site, which is less TI focused, is Mr. Martin’s Calculator Museum website. Bonus in this site are links to particular slide rule and abacus related material.

Quillbot – A Fast Writing Tool

https://quillbot.com/

Quillbot is a nice free (paid version available) tool to help rephrase or fix grammar issues in writing. Sometimes I encounter tough sentences when preparing papers. A quick copy and paste through Quillbot has helped. I also have referred to some of my students to the site. I do caution that sometimes the meaning of sentences or the technical message can be changed. Sometimes small word changes result in large changes in meaning or what we are trying to convey.

Acoular

http://www.acoular.org/

My students and myself have had some good luck with the open source and free software package Acoular. We used it to try and visualize the acoustic source distribution within a tornado. It worked fairly well, but of course the technique is dependent on the quality of data used. This is generated by CFD simulations usually. CFD for acoustic analysis needs to be high-resolution and have small time steps. This is rather complicated by the fact that these simulations take more time than others. At the end of the day, the program produced some aesthetic images.

Silicon Graphics Tech. Advice

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html

This amazing website contains lots of great technical information on SGI. Many of my students have no idea what SGI is, which is unfortunate, but a quick Wikipedia read is just a Google search away. I grew up with some SGI machines, where I remember running some of my first CFD codes on late at night. SGI might not always be the tech. leader in performance, but their machines had the most style! That should count for something when today Macs have done so well on the open market.

On Teaching Philosophy

You asked me how should I best teach them. Should I teach them from the point of view of the history of science the applications? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy. We must be chaotic and confuse them in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it.  That’s the only way I can see the answer.  So as to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along. And during the time when the fellow who was interested in history is being bored by the abstract mathematics. On the other hand the fellow who likes abstraction is being bored at another time by the histories. You can do it so you don’t bore them all, all the time. I really don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to answer this question of different kinds of minds with different kinds of interests. What hooks them on, what makes them interested, how do you direct them to become interested? One way is by a kind of force, you have to pinch this course, you have to take that examination. It’s a very effective way many people go through schools that way this may be the more effective way. I’m sorry, after many many years of trying to teach and trying all different kinds of methods, I really don’t know how to do it.

Prof. Richard Feynman, Ph.D., Altadena, California, March, 1966.