The Human Calculator

The Human Calculator is a calculator for the rest of us. The non-scientists who haven’t used scientific notation since high school. The rest of us who might still, from time to time, have to work with very big or very small numbers, if only just to understand the world. With the Human Calculator, to enter the number 300 million, type “3 hundred million”, to divide that by 7 billion, then type “÷ 7 billion =“ The result shown, 4.29 hundredths, is about the fraction of the world’s population that lives in the United States. Easy.

The Human Calculator is where mathematics meets language: it expresses numbers as a short sequence of digits followed by a sequence of number words. For most people, words are more meaningful and intuitive than scientific notation which is what gives the Human Calculator its expressive power.

The Human Calculator will be particularly appreciated by journalists, lawyers, high school students in chemistry class, ..., anybody who wants to make sense of very big or very small numbers. Even scientists will find the Human Calculator helpful when they need to explain their findings to the general public.

Nelson Mandela said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” We agree, and have therefore made dedicated versions in 162 languages, in the hope of helping math go to the heart for speakers of all of these. The set includes all the major international languages, of course, but also many small island languages such as Faroese, national languages such as Romanian, all of the 11 national languages of South Africa, 12 of the national languages of India, and so on. Even constructed languages such as Klingon (Qo’noS), Dothraki (Essos) and Quenya (Middle Earth) are supported. Eatoni is particularly excited to offer this product in threatened or endangered languages such as Cherokee and Breton. Our wish is that the Human Calculator may serve students in immersive language courses, so that even in math class their study language can speak with them.