How to use math tables
Before computers, everyone needing to do mathematical calculations depended on handbooks with tables of function values.
If the exact value that you needed was in the table, then looking up that value was trivial. However, you typically needed more range and more resolution, and this required more skill than simply looking up numbers.
I wrote two blog posts this morning about how to compute using math tables: a basic post on computing trig functions and a more advanced post on computing the gamma function for complex inputs.
I intend to write more posts in this series.