On 8/30/12, Mike Speciner <ms@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
[...] It's amazing how clever nomographers could be, but of course now that just about everyone carries around an electronic computation device, it is a lost art. It did, however, inspire me some years later to write a pile of PostScript to (amongst other things) plot nomograms: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/17718830/plot.ps I suppose writing PostScript has also become a lost art.
I created a nomogram for x^(x^(y-1))=z, which is the lower hyper4 operator (http://mrob.com/pub/math/hyper4.html#lower4); and here is a sliderule that calculates x^y=z and its inverses in the range e^0.001 <= z <= e^100 ~ 10^43: http://mrob.com/pub/math/sliderules.html#model3 Co-workers noted the immense amount of computer power that has gone into creating this low-precision analogue device. I certainly still remember PostScript programming, and there is much more to nomography (than I ever learned). -- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com