THE CALCULATOR

The calculator is used by a lot of people around the world but , what do we know about it?

The first calculator

The first calculator was invented by Blaise Pascal in France in 1642. This calculator amazed Descartes and the Queen Christine of Sweden. Pascal was a brilliant boy who at the age of 16 years old could make very difficult maths exercises. When he was 17 he made an essay with 400 proves, one of them was the Pascal's Theorem. At the age of 19 he invented the calculator to help his father. Pascal died at the age of 39.

The man who invented the calculator

100 years before the computer was invented, the English mathematician Charles Babbage invented the first mechanic calculator in 1822. Twelve years later, he designed with Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter), another calculator which could solve differential equations. Unfortunately they couldn’t finish it, but in the years 1985 and 1991, a group of English scientists made it through the plans of Babbage and Lovelace.
Spanish calculator
The Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo in 1893 made a machine that could solve equations of all degrees. Torres Quevedo also invented a machine that could play chess and a cable car which crossed the Niagara Falls.
A few years later, the Catalonian engineer Pauli Castells I Vidal invented two different calculators, one of them could solve equations and the other one could make systems of linear equations.
Human calculator
There are a few people who can make difficult operations very fast, for them the calculator is useless.
Shakuntala Devi, an Indian woman, multiplied two 13-digits numbers in 28 seconds.
Wilhem Klein, a Dutch man made a 13th root of a 100-digits numbers in 90 seconds but Jaime Garcia Serrano, Colombian made the same problem in 15 seconds!

As a result, our life is easier thanks to all the people who have developed the invention of the calculator.