Can Calculus or Geometry be done without a calculator?
Yes. I took these classes before electronic pocket calculators existed in the form they do today. The electromechanical calculators we had were big, heavy, slow, and noisy and most of them had no square root key, let alone any of the log or trig functions available on today’s pocket scientific calculators. We had to use slide rules of printed tables of function values for these, perhaps calculating the square roots by hand. Even then, it was mostly my physics and chemistry classes rather than math that were computation intensive, but I was glad to have a scientific calculator by the time I took my numerical analysis class. Even though pocket calculators weren’t around when I entered college, nearly everyone had one by the time I graduated and hardly anyone was still using a slide rule.
yes, in college I wasn’t allowed to use a calculator on calculus tests because so much information can be plugged into them and they can be used for cheating. However, the tests used numbers that were easy to calculate in your head or quickly on paper. I always used calculators for my homework problems and often times I had to use math software for very complicated problems. Remember, times have changed since the 80’s. Students now do calculations for homework that would not have been possible 20 years ago. They would have taken a lifetime to complete, but now with computer software, they take a couple hours. As far as being able to get through an entire semester of calculus without using a calculator or computer?
