Slide Rule Collection Donated to Illinois Tech

Today, I received notice from the Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology that the slide rule collection I donated to the school is now on display. Over forty years ago, I started collecting slide rules and over the years, the collection grew to over thirty items. Earlier this year, I donated the collection to Illinois Tech, where I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering.

The collection also includes books of logarithmic and trigonometric values.

Some photos of the library display are shown below:

(photos by: Matt David, Director, Advancement Special Projects, IIT)

Other posts on slide rules: 

Math Vacation: 2022 Anniversaries (jamesmacmath.blogspot.com)

Math Vacation: Benford Distribution - Additional Thoughts (jamesmacmath.blogspot.com)

 

2022 Anniversaries

Science News just celebrated their 100th anniversary and posted the top 10 anniversaries for 2022.

Of their top ten, my favorite is the 400th anniversary of William Oughtred's invention of the slide rule (see prior post also using this photo of my slide rule). Another is the 50th anniversary of the Pioneer 10 launch. It was designed for a 21-month mission to fly pass Jupiter. Pioneer 10 ended up sending back information about our solar system for 30 years. The last signal was received from Pioneer 10 twenty years ago this year. One other anniversary that is very important to me is the 100th anniversary of Frederick Banting's first human trial of injecting insulin to treat a 10-year-old boy with diabetes. 

Benford Distribution - Additional Thoughts

Shown above is a photo of one of my many slide rules. This is my favorite, an all-metal Picket Model N4-ES. Many of the scales are arranged in logarithmic basis. Benford's law states that with collections of numbers ranging over multiple magnitudes, there is a tendency for more numbers to begin with low digits than with higher digits. One explanation uses a logarithmic scale as one shown below:

(image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:GKFX )

Let this scale represent a collection of data spanning three orders of magnitude. Picking a point along the scale at random, one will has a 30% of landing with a number beginning with 1 and under just under 5% for a number beginning with 9.

Link to prior post on Benford Distribution.