20 Mar
2020
20 Mar
'20
4:07 p.m.
On 20/03/2020, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
From: Paul
Guertin
I teach math in college ... Sometimes, during an
exam, a student who
forgot to bring their calculator will ask if they can borrow mine I
always say "sure, but you'll regret it" and hand them the calculator
After wasting one or two minutes, they give it back
[,,,] [...] and any reasonably intelligent high-schooler
should get it
extremely quickly; just tell them it's just a representational thing,
number number operator instead of number operator number.
A former colleague -- electronics engineer, to boot -- told me that he
refuses to use RPN calculators because one will not always be
available and he does not want to become "dependent" on it.
Offsetting that, my wife -- who does not work in a technical field --
swears by her 32S (and still has her 35 somewhere). I have my
caculators on my Macs all set to RPN.
Perhaps a bit mean of me, but when people were befuddled, I used to
say that my calculators used "natural" input.
N.