Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator. By Keith Houston. W.W. Norton & Company; 384 pages; $32.50. To be published in Britain in October; £25 WHEN WAS the last time you used a ...

Form is temporary, function is permanent. The most important inventions are the ones that relate to the human condition, and they crop up over and over again. Below, Houston shares five key insights ...

If you spend any time around technology, and probably even if you don’t, then you’ll probably also have heard some variation on the saying, “There’s more computing power in your pocket than was used ...

Most people take calculators for granted, especially now that they’re built into our phones. But the noble pocket calculator has a long, surprisingly colorful history. The Twitter account Pulp ...

When Dave Hicks fell in love at 13, it was head over heels like many boys. But the object of Hicks' affections fit neatly into a pocket, did square roots and spoke a language called Reverse Polish ...

[Chris] has built a pocket calculator that emulates… a pocket calculator. Two pocket calculators, in fact. Inspired by [Ken Shirriff’s] incredible reverse engineering of the Sinclair scientific ...

Unabridged” by Stefan Fatsis is a lively history of dictionaries that also looks at how they reflect and ratify changes in our language.

We’ve all got calculators on our phones, in our web browsers, and even in the home “assistant” that’s listening in on your conversations all day on the off chance you blurt out a math question is can ...