M
My Reckonings
myreckonings.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
Ron Doerfler writes about nomography, graphical calculation, and forgotten methods in the mathematical sciences.
What HN saysHN links it for 'The Lost Art of Nomography'. Commenters call it a nice article and add resources like pynomo.
24HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
16stories submitted
159story points
4 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Art of Nomography (2008)8 people · 65 points · first shared 2008 · 6 comments on HN
- 2The lost art of Nomography5 people · 64 points · first shared 2011 · 19 comments on HN
- 3Heaviside’s Operator Calculus2 people · 20 points · first shared 2009 · 5 comments on HN
- 4Dead Reckonings - Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences2 people · 4 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 5A 2010 "Graphical Computing" Calendar2 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 6A 2011 “Lightning Calculation” Calendar1 people · 2 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 7Dead Reckonings » A 2011 “Lightning Calculation” Calendar1 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Nomograms use geometry to represent and solve equations1 people · 1 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 9The (Not So) Simple Pendulum1 people · 1 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 10Dead Reckoning1 people · first shared 2009
- 11Modernnomograms1 people · first shared 2021
What HN people wrote when they linked it
ky3 · 2014-12-26
mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved.
What Heaviside did was the sort of fast-and-loose syntactic manipulation that makes mathematicians queasy and/or indignant [1]. He treats the derivative operator just like it were an ordinary number X. And then he infers that 1/X must mean integration.
Compare to the naive argument for the positive integers 1+2+3+... summing to -1/12 that gets mathbabe's panties in a twist [2].
More details in Ch. 10 of Nahin's book.
[1] http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-operator-calcu…
[2] http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-not-math/
dang · 2023-01-01
The submitted URL (http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/JournalArticle/Th… is not currently returning a pdf. There's an archived version at https://web.archive.org/web/20111226124705/http://myreckonings.com/wor…
In the meantime I think we can change the URL to https://deadreckonings.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/nomography.pdf, which has an earlier version of the same piece.
mixedmath · 2021-07-13
This is a nice article.
I know of a couple other resources. First and foremost is the site modernnomographs [1]. Popular mechanics once included a perpetual calendar nomograph [2]. Possibly pynomo [3], a python tool to make nomographs, would also be interesting to others.
[1]: http://www.myreckonings.com/modernnomograms/
[2]: https://books.google.com/books?id=mN4DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA699&pg=PA…
[3]: http://pynomo.org/wiki/index.php/Basics
goialoq · 2017-10-18
better, with graphics: http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/JournalArticle/Th…
jacobolus · 2014-09-01
shithead · 2011-09-14
First thing in the series of blog articles: http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2008/01/09/the-art-of-nomography-i-g…
pasbesoin · 2010-01-04
Note the calendars provided on what is currently the top post:
A 2010 "Graphical Computing" Calendar
http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2009/12/31/a-2010-graphical-computin…
ableal · 2009-04-26
For those intrigued by this kind of thing, this book (paper only, but the web page has more resources) may be interesting:
Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments, by Ronald W. Doerfler (http://www.myreckonings.com/Dead_Reckoning/Dead_Reckoning.htm )
More good stuff at http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/ . The nomography posts had caught my eye a while ago, and there may be more of those coming soon.
(Disclosure: I recently exchanged a couple of emails with the author, after leaving a comment on the Heaviside post which was briefly featured here.)