Scientific calculator

A scientific calculator is a type of electronic calculator, usually but not always handheld, designed to calculate problems in science, engineering, and mathematics. They have almost completely replaced slide rules in almost all traditional applications, and are widely used in both education and professional settings.

In certain contexts such as higher education, scientific calculators have been superseded by graphing calculators, which offer a superset of scientific calculator functionality along with the ability to graph input data and write and store programs for the device. There is also some overlap with the financial calculator market.

Modern scientific calculators generally have many more features than a standard four or five-function calculator, and the feature set differs between manufacturers and models; however, the defining features of a scientific calculator include:

In addition, high-end scientific calculators generally include:

While most scientific models have traditionally used a single-line display similar to traditional pocket calculators, many of them have at the very least more digits (10 to 12), sometimes with extra digits for the floating point exponent. A few have multi-line displays, with some recent models from Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, Casio, Sharp, and Canon using dot matrix displays similar to those found on graphing calculators.

Scientific calculators are used widely in any situation where quick access to certain mathematical functions is needed, especially those that were once looked up in tables, such as trigonometric functions or logarithms; they are also used in situations requiring calculations of very large or very small numbers, as in some aspects of astronomy, physics, and chemistry.

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