It’s no bigger than a drinking glass, and it fits easily in the palm of the hand. It resembles a pepper grinder—or perhaps a hand grenade. The diminutive “Curta” is a striking machine, a mechanical ...

Calculators have evolved over centuries from large computing machines into today’s highly functional, pocket-sized devices capable of performing complex computations, graphing multiple lines at once ...

Anyone who is baffled by mathematics beyond the multiplication tables can imagine with awe the Brobdingnagian mental efforts involved in inventing a clerkproof, 5,500-part machine that adds, subtracts ...