It’s publication day! Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator is published today in the USA. You can order a copy from from Norton, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson, IndieBound, Powell’s, Target or Walmart.
My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US tomorrow (‼️), the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators. Today, we’re looking at a calculator used by a remarkable person indeed: the late Katherine Johnson, a “human computer” and mathematician at NASA’s laboratory in Langley, Virginia.
My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US on Tuesday the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators. This time, we’re taking a look at the “math grenade”, as William Gibson calls it in his novel Pattern Recognition — the mechanical, cylindrical, pocketable Curta.
My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US this coming Tuesday, the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d start a series of posts about a few of my favourite calculators.
Towards the end of a very hot May, we spent a week in Narbonne in France. Narbonne is an old Roman town, once called Narbo Martius, that forms one point of a shallow triangle with the medieval walled city of Carcassonne and the bullfighting mecca of Béziers. It’s a nice little place; somewhere between a tourist trap and a working town, with plenty to see and do in and around the local area.