One of the first mechanical calculators—the Pascaline—was built in the 1640s by French mathematician Blaise Pascal to help his father, who worked as a tax collector.

The first commercially successful calculating machine—the arithmometer—was patented in 1820 but not mass-produced for over three decades, likely because its inventor was focused on his insurance business.

Among the smallest mass-produced mechanical calculators in history, the Curta was designed by Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

Unsatisfied with the designs provided by an Apple engineer, Steve Jobs designed the original Mac calculator in about 10 minutes.

Slide rules—ruler-sized mechanical calculators with a component that slides out to show relationships between numbers—were used by engineers at NASA during the Apollo missions.

Designed in 1937 by Harvard graduate student Howard H. Aiken, the 'Harvard Calculator' was used by the US Navy to solve advanced physics problems.

Abaci, the plural of abacus, allowed individuals to perform arithmetic and tally quantities by moving pebbles called calculi, from which the word 'calculator' is derived.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

The Model K—named for its construction on a kitchen table—was the first electromechanical digital binary adder, which used an electric circuit to provide the sum of a pair of zeroes and ones in binary.

VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet, released with Apple II's personal computer in 1979

Before 1979, managers were essentially information processors working off paper ledgers. Scenario modeling was slow, manual, and expensive. Companies were understood as organizations that built things with financial analysis as secondary. VisiCalc made calculation so cheap that you could work iteratively, setting out forecasts and tweaking assumptions until you got the answer you wanted. Oks argues It created a new way of seeing the world.

The Ishango bone suggests mathematics was born about 20,000 years ago

Ancient civilizations developed mathematical systems for various purposes, including the Egyptians for the construction of the pyramids and the Ancient Greeks for logical reasoning in theorems. However, these systems were predated by the Ishango bone—found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—whose notches suggest a base ten system, prime numbers, and simple mathematical operations.

More than 2,000 years ago, a hand-powered model of the solar system called the Antikythera mechanism—the oldest example of an analog computer—could predict solar eclipses.

The Antikythera mechanism: The oldest-known analog computer

A device now considered the world's oldest computer was pulled from a shipwreck more than 120 years ago. Known as the "Antikythera Mechanism," it is now believed to have allowed precise tracking of astronomical positions, and its sophistication overturned understanding of Ancient Greek capabilities.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

Arnold Schoenberg designed a musical typewriter that transcribed complex compositions with a simple keyboard.

Calculators convert input values into a form of scientific notation—a fixed set of digits with a decimal multiplied by a base to some exponent—to store and process very large or very small quantities efficiently at the cost of rounding errors.

The first algorithmic random number generator was developed in 1946

Although previous methods of randomness involved physical tools with limited outcomes, such as dice, or relied on chaotic variables for number generation, such as electronic noise, John Von Neumann's middle-square method turned the problem into a mathematical computation. It has since been replaced by methods that generate numbers from unique initial values, such as the time on a clock.

Before alarm clocks, people relied more heavily on their circadian rhythms, humans hired to wake them, and on tools such as candle clocks that dropped pins in metal trays at roughly set intervals.

As of 2025, the College Board has banned the use of calculators with computer algebra systems on the SAT and PSAT.

Despite the abundance of free graphing software, Texas Instruments' de facto monopoly and the continued demand for its use in standardized testing have kept the cost and design of graphing calculators largely unchanged for decades.

A 14-year-old "human calculator" shatters six mathematical world records in one day

A teenage prodigy from Maharashtra, India named Aaryan Shukla set the record for the fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers. He did so in just 25.19 seconds–roughly equivalent to one addition every 0.5 seconds. The math whiz said he practices calculations for around five to six hours a day.

Mathematical breakthroughs influenced Shakespeare’s stories

New ideas in math were transforming Europe at the time Shakespeare penned his plays, including newly popular conceptions of zero via philosophers Descartes and Leibniz.

Early timekeeping tools included sundials, water clocks, and astrolabes

Astrolabes also provided a person's latitude based on the height of the stars in the sky, thus aiding in navigation. Incense and candle clocks relied on the constant burning rate of fire to track the passage of time based on premarked locations with equal-interval spacing.

FLOW-MATIC was the first programming language resembling the English language

As part of the team working on UNIVAC—the first commercially produced electronic digital computer in the US—Grace Hopper helped develop the system that enabled nonprogrammers and businesspeople without a strong mathematics background to use the machine effectively, thereby enhancing the computer's commercial viability.

The Middle Ages produced inventions that still affect our lives today, like coffee houses and improved agricultural techniques.

From the Greek for 'star taker,' the astrolabe allowed individuals to tell time and determine their latitude based on the position of the sun or other stars, as well as calculate the height of objects.

Early 20th-century debates about horses with 'paranormal mathematical abilities' helped shape modern approaches to psychological research.

Computer pioneer Alan Turing was also an elite runner

Alan Turing is credited with helping to found modern computer science, in addition to cracking the Nazi code known as Enigma. Beyond these world-historical achievements, the British mathematician also nearly represented his country in the Olympics in the marathon, running just 11 minutes slower than the eventual gold recipient at the 1948 games. Read more on this lesser-known aspect of the man here.

The first compiler to facilitate communication with computers was developed by Grace Hopper

The A-0 program linker automatically translated mathematical symbols into machine-readable binary code. Although it took two years for computer executives to get on board with the idea, the technology was foundational to future programming languages that allowed computers to understand commands written in word-based languages.

In 1880, Jacques and Pierre Curie discovered that electricity could be produced by striking certain materials—the piezoelectric effect—a phenomenon that is seen in barbecue lighters.

How a competition honoring a king's birthday uncovered history's first chaotic system

A committee established a contest for King Oscar II's 60th birthday, featuring four unsolved problems in mathematics, including one on proving the stability of a system of more than two objects held together by gravity. Focusing on three celestial objects, Henri Poincaré won the prize for his proof, which he later learned was incorrect and, upon correcting it, instead proved these systems to be unstable.

On a basic calculator, the keys that start with M, such as M+ and M-, are memory keys that allow users to store and modify a number in the device's memory.

Introduced in 1981 for $1,795, the Osborne 1 was the world's first commercially successful portable laptop, despite weighing 24.5 pounds and having no battery.

The first printed Advent calendars were from Germany in the early 1900s

Printed Advent calendars originated in early-20th-century Germany, where printer Gerhard Lang created the first commercially produced versions. Inspired by his mother’s homemade countdowns, Lang added small doors in the 1920s, establishing the format that spread worldwide.

The story of two female programmers running the simulations behind chaos theory's discovery

Margaret Hamilton and Ellen Fetter worked on MIT's 800-pound Royal McBee LGP-30 computer, which was fed binary code on paper tape to perform computations. Among the computations performed were those involving equations describing the motion of gas in a circulating fluid for Edward Lorenz, widely considered the father of chaos theory.

Astronomers inferred Neptune's existence through mathematics while attempting to explain irregularities in Uranus' orbit, but Neptune had been directly observed 234 years earlier by Galileo.

View a library of custom programs that can be loaded onto graphing calculators, including productivity tools, reference materials, games, and interactive applications, such as prom proposals.

In 1822, French scholar Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs using the Rosetta Stone.

The history of graphics processing units began with hardware for displaying visuals in arcade machines, but the transition to 3D graphics led to the microchips and software that power today's AI data centers.

Bill Nye holds patents for three inventions and designs for a digital abacus

His pointe shoes feature a support structure to protect ballet dancers' toes during performance. The throwing technique trainer guides athletes in achieving the optimal form for throwing a ball, while the educational magnifying glass made from a plastic bag and water featured on his show.

The New Year's ball was based on a navigational tool

Robert Wauchope, a member of the Royal Navy, developed the contraption in 1818 so crews could know the time while out at sea. The ball would descend at the same time every day, allowing ships to set their clocks accordingly.

The Medicis of Italy innovated 'bills of exchange,' precursors to checks

At the time, lending money for interest (also known as usury) was banned in much of the Christian world. The enterprising Medicis developed bills of exchange to allow merchants to promise payment without cash or coin (with some discrete means of earning interest woven in). Learn more about how this family laid the foundation for modern banking.

The treadmill was invented as a machine for prison labor

William Cubitt invented the machine in the early 1800s, imagining prisoners, usually two at a time, would use it to grind grain or pump water.

Benjamin Franklin advocated for the use of paper money and even engineered some key anticounterfeiting techniques used today.

Credit for inventing the laser was fought over for nearly three decades

Although Theodore Maiman built the first working laser in 1960, Gordon Gould coined the term earlier. Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow of Bell Labs filed a patent after Gould came up with the idea and name, but before Gould filed his patent.

Logic gates—digital versions of conditional statements, such as 'if 0 and 1, then 1'—are specialized circuits that combine multiple digital signals, like the binary code representing numbers, into a single output, thereby allowing machines to perform math.

A 2,000-year history of alarm clocks

Clocks have revolutionized the way we live, structuring our days into abstract, regular units and providing quantification for those who are chronically late. The alarm clock was the next obvious step: clocks which not only tell you the time but...

Before transistors, which regulate the flow of electricity, vacuum tubes—glass tubes containing no gas that resemble light bulbs—served as the electronic switches in computers.

Their 1901 Wind Tunnel system revolutionized the study of aeronautics

Only the second to be built in the US, the wind tunnel allowed the brothers to study how air moves around more than 200 different wing shapes. This data helped them refine a key math equation, long held as the standard, that had been based only on one wing shape.

Turing machines consist of an infinite tape, a read-write mechanism and instructions

Based on the information the mechanism reads on the tape, the machine follows the applicable instruction (e.g., if you read a 1, write a 0) and may proceed to the next cell of data. Given enough time and memory, Alan Turing proposed such a machine could perform any computation.

Try counting like the Maya in this interactive math game

The Maya numerical system used dots for 1, bars for 5, and a shell symbol for zero. This interactive resource lets users practice counting with the Maya base-20 system using the same symbols once common in the Yucatán.