Rich Howard passed along a 1998 SciAm article about Japanese Temple Geometry, an interesting kind of art. Google turned up a non-paywalled link at www.math.rutgers.edu/~sussmann/papers/res-japanese-temple-geometry.ps.gz see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangaku Wrt Henry's thread about math function lookup tables, two quick notes: The article includes a list of tables available on a chip, beginning with squares. There's no mention of two ancient methods of multiplication, using quarter-squares, or triangular numbers: QS(N) = floor[N^2 / 4] xy = QS(x+y) - QS(x-y) T(N) = N(N+1)/2 xy = T(x+y) - T(x) - T(y) I've seen references to tables of quarter-squares. As noted previously, the current ratio of compute:memory timing makes this (only) an interesting historical method. But recall that the famous Intel Floating Divide Bug depended on data missing from an internal chip table of reciprocals. In a different direction: The IBM 1620 computer (c.1962) used tables in memory for single-digit addition and multiplication. This might have been used to do arithmetic in other bases < 10. In other news, I didn't see any mention on the list of Raymond Smullyan's passing. Maybe I missed it? Finally, a quick note about a new attack on ECDLP, the Elliptic Curve Discrete Log Problem. The paper is at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.07544.pdf. The claim is a new, more efficient algorithm, but the supporting evidence is thin. They mention solving problems in an elliptic curve group of order 129159847, which is too small to be definitive. There's no specific statement of the form "the ECDLP for a curve of order X can be solved in work f(X)", but the ingredients for an analysis are present. They do seem to have a new idea. I haven't worked out a work estimate. Rich