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.

Named for its construction on a kitchen table, the Model K added binary numbers and laid the groundwork for modern digital computing.

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

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

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

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

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

Mathematical breakthroughs influenced Shakespeare’s stories

Early timekeeping tools included sundials, water clocks, and astrolabes

Described as the most beautiful equation in mathematics, Euler's identity combines five unrelated but fundamental constants into one relationship.

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

Once an employee at the Swiss Patent Office, Albert Einstein held approximately 50 patents, including ones for a refrigerator, hearing aids, and a blouse design.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The treadmill was invented as a machine for prison labor

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

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.

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute placed million-dollar bounties on seven unsolved problems in mathematics—the Millennium Prize Problems—in the hopes of spurring solutions.

A 2,000-year history of alarm clocks

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.