On October 23, 1635, German astronomer and mathematician Wilhelm Schickard, who constructued the very first mechanical calculator, passed away. His famous calculator was able to perform additions and subtractions. For more complicated operations, it provided so-called Napier bones, named after the Scottish mathematician John Napier, who came up with the idea of logarithms. Although it is widely believed that the first mechanical calculating device was created by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642. However, that distinction actually belongs to Wilhelm Schickard.
The polynom package implements macros for manipulating polynomials, for example it can typeset long polynomial divisions. The main test case and application is the polynomial ring in one variable with rational coefficients.
On November 16, 1717, French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist Jean Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was born. He was co-editor with Denis Diderot of the famous Encyclopédie, edited between 1751 and 1772.
computation of 5 trillion digits of Pi. This article details some of the methods that were used for the computation as well as the hardware and the full timeline of the computation
Nick Teanby's software page: creates evenly spaced points on sphere; An icosahedron based method for even binning of globally distributed remote sensing data
A library of good packings, coverings and maximal volume arrangements of points on the sphere in 3 dimensions having icosahedral symmetry. The number of points ranges from 60 to 78032
Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://scitation.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=PMARCW000006000001015002000001&idtype=cvips