Hand-Held Calculator Reaches Age 40

October 12, 2007

To recognize the 40th anniversary of the hand-held calculator, Texas Instruments recently donated various models to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. The devices that altered educational instruction will appear alongside such historic items as the table that Thomas Jefferson used when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and the hat that Abraham Lincoln wore when he was assassinated.

Today's students "maybe are not so great at computing numbers on the back of a notebook," said Jerry Merryman, 75, a co-inventor of the hand-held calculator. Nonetheless, he told an audience at the Smithsonian Institution, calculators have expanded students' "reach and grasp" of mathematics.

Calculators allow students to "jump past the grunt work and get to more sophisticated levels of analysis," said James M. Rubillo, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which advocated their use as early as kindergarten in the 1980s.

"Kids whose arithmetic skills may be weak can rely on calculators to do that work, and they can still do algebra," John Mahoney told the Washington Post. Mahoney is a math teacher at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in the District of Columbia and a consultant for Texas Instruments. "It's just like word processing," he said. "There are people who can't spell . . . but word processing can allow them to express things well and be creative."

But Elizabeth Korte, a math teacher at Stone Bridge High School, in Loudoun County, Va., said that while calculators can help students understand mathematical principles, they have to be used "in their place."

"You should memorize your basic math facts," she told the Washington Post. "I believe if you are comfortable with mental math, it's easier to do higher math."

For more on the invention of the calculator, see "The History of the Hand-Held Calculator" by Kathy B. Hamrick, published in The American Mathematical Monthly, October 1996, vol. 103, pp. 633-639.

Source: Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2007.