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Types of Calculators Umbrella Chart

Calculator Types

Calculators are simply devices that perform arithmetic operations. These devices allow users to simplify mathematical problems, and be able to focus more on understanding and solving the bigger problems.

There are many different calculators, purposed for more specified tasks. The four function, or basic calculator, performs the core operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. These are usually the cheapest handheld ones available. More advanced calculators can solve algebraic problems as well. Some calculators include these operations, and logarathims; trignometric functions sin, cosine, and tangent; and binary functions. These are known as scientific calculators. Scientific calculators that can also graph functions and plot coordinates, including trignometric functions, are known as graphing calculators. Calculators tailored to help solve fincancial problems, called financial calculators, perform basic algebraic equations and such, as well as time value calculations, interest rates, present and future money values, and payment calculations. Financial calculators that also perform various statistical metrics including mean, median, mode, standard deviation, and so on for a given data set, are considered statistical calculators, of which perform various metrics including mean, median, mode, standard deviation.

Calculator GUIs

There are many available hand-held calculators out there, and many more online ones. We focus on how the online ones work, as this is what we decided to make, though both work in relatively similar ways. Most online calculators are hosted by a website, and use a button interface to get the information needed from the user to perform the calculation desired.

These GUIs usually look very similar to handheld calculators.

General online calculator GUI is represented next.

Flowchart of steps covered: click “2”, convert 2 to binary, click “+”, click “2”, compute 2+2 in binary with logic gates to perform the operation, click “=“, display computation result “4”.

Step-by-Step Process Flowchart

How Calculators Work?

As for how these calculators function, the process is much like that of a handheld one, as both rely on a computer for computation.

For example, to add 2 and 2, the user would first click the "2" button on the interface.

This stores the value of 2 in a place where the program can access it later, like a variable.

When the computer stores a value, it converts it to binary using electric current to turn on and off a series of switches that represent 1s and 0s.

Then the user clicks the "+" followed by the "2" button again. This tells the computer to increase the value stored in the variable by 2.

When the computer is given inputs, it can combine them using a complex array of logic gates.

Essentially, the AND and XOR gates do the computation by delegating the 1s to the AND gate and the 0s to the XOR gate.

Finally, when the user clicks "=", the computer prints the value "4" on the screen. This is where the computer converts the binary sum to the decimal system we more commonly use for our day to day computations.

Computers process more complex operations similarly, carrying out multiplication with repeated addition, and dividing with repeated subtraction.

History of Calculators:

2000 BC: Somalia & Egypt used abacus, which is a fram with rods of beads. the beads in each row are slided to count the number of units in each place value
17th century AD: Europe developed first mechanical calculators
- John Napier developed logarithms
- Edward Gunter, William Oughtred, others developed slide rule
  - slide rule: sliding stick (disc) uses logarithms to configure a device that allows multiplication and division
1642: Blaise Pascal developed the first mechanical calculator (performed addition & subtraction)
1820: Thomas de Colmar patented the 4-function Arithmometer
1877: Grant Mechanical Calculating Machine: hand-cranked adding machine

Chronological History of Python Versions:

February 1991: Python 0.9.0 developed by Guido van Rossum, named after Monty Python's Flying Circus
January 1994: Python 1.0 released with keyword arguments in functions
October 2000: Python 2.0 released with list comprehension
July 2010: Python 2.7.0 released with Unicode support
December 2008: Python 3 released, backwards incompatible
December 2016: Python 3.6 released, unified str/unicode types
March 2018: Python 3.6.5 released, automatic conversion of python 2.x code
May 2018: Python 3.7.0 released, new C API, data classes, context variables
October 2019: Python 3.8 released, assignment expression, positional-only parameters
October 2020: Python 3.9 released, dictionary merge, update operators, built in generic types

REFERENCES

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