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lutusplast Friday at 5:50 AM1 replyview on HN

Are you asking how the bracelet multiplies two numbers? It's the same idea used by slide rules -- you take the logarithm of the two numbers, then add the logarithms instead of multiplying -- same result, with somewhat less accuracy depending on available decimal places.

This method was widely used in the pre-computer era to save time in calculations. Tables of logarithms (and slide rules) were a mathematician's best friend.


Replies

acidtechno303last Friday at 11:32 AM

lol, as an engineer I'd never considered that other disciplines used slide rules voraciously