Rod Carvalho wrote a post this morning announcing a beautiful 2010 calendar created by Ron Doerfler. Doerfler’s blog is entitled Dead Reckonings: Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences. The calendar is an example of such lost art. It is illustrated with nomograms, ingenious ways of computing with graphs before electronic calculators were common. The illustrations are pleasant to look at even if you have no idea what they mean.

Image via Ron Doerfler.

Related posts

Spherical trig is a lost art. Why care about spherical trig?

The Gudermannian function gd(x) is another interesting relic of an early time. It is closely related to the Mercator projection and shows how to relate ordinary and hyperbolic trig functions without using complex numbers.

The image above shows solutions to the equation u + v + w = uvw. Here’s a post explaining the significance of that equation.