When I got to college, I was told to get a slide rule at the bookstore, never used one before. We always did calculations on paper in High School. The math teacher in college told us we had to use the slide rule for the first semester, no calculators allowed. His postulation was that most mistakes on the calculator were decimal place errors, if you learn the slide rule you have to keep track of the decimal places in your head. You can actually be faster with a slide rule than a calculator, the only thing is you don’t have the accuracy out to 4 places, sometimes even 3.
When I got to college, I was told to get a slide rule at the bookstore, never used one before. We always did calculations on paper in High School. The math teacher in college told us we had to use the slide rule for the first semester, no calculators allowed. His postulation was that most mistakes on the calculator were decimal place errors, if you learn the slide rule you have to keep track of the decimal places in your head. You can actually be faster with a slide rule than a calculator, the only thing is you don’t have the accuracy out to 4 places, sometimes even 3.