This week I went to my 80 year old Electrical Circuits professor’s office hours to get a few questions answered. He asked me to put one of the equations we had come up with into my calculator, to which my response was that my calculator doesn’t do equations with more than one unknown.

His reply: ”You can’t be a mechanic without a wrench. You need the right tool for the job!”

So I decided to get myself a new wrench; a HP 50g calculator:

It can solve any number of equations with any number of unknowns, numerical and symbolical calculus, matrices, differential equations, Laplace transforms, Taylor series expansions, vector and statistical analysis, complex numbers, and tons of other things I don’t know about yet. Oh, and the most important thing: RPN (Reverse Polish Notation). I got used to it in no time and can’t imagine not using it anymore. It’s so fast!