Mathemagician Video

[Steve Simpkin]

(07-24-2021 01:29 AM)jlw Wrote:  ...
Then again, in at least one of my HP calculator manuals, is the story of Truman Henry Safford, a 10-year-old child prodigy asked to square 365,365,365,365,365,365. A parting shot claimed that no calculator ever made, even theirs, could do that.

Quotes from the Introduction section in the HP-45 manual.

"Little is understood about the methods used by calculating prodigies to perform their awesome feats. The method used by 10-year-old Truman Henry Safford, in 1846 to calculate 3653653653653653652 (as described by the Rev. H. W. Adams) shows that difficult problems are difficult even for prodigies—"...he flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking and then seeming to be in agony, until, in not more than a minute said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!"

"Although your HP-45 might not be as much fun to watch, it makes calculating faster and less arduous, because the operational stack and the reverse "Polish" notation used by the HP-45 provide the most efficient way known to computer science for evaluating mathematical expressions."

And from a bit later in the introduction:

"Incidentally, no calculator available today (including ours) can handle the problem given to our child prodigy. Isn't it comforting to know that people can still do things machines can't?"

https://www.hpmuseum.org/hp45.htm