Slashdot Mirror
'Calculators Killed the Standard Statistical Table' (sas.com)
theodp writes: In an obituary of sorts for the standard probability tables that were once ubiquitous in introductory statistics textbooks, Rick Wicklin writes: "In my first probability and statistics course, I constantly referenced the 23 statistical tables (which occupied 44 pages!) in the appendix of my undergraduate textbook. Any time I needed to compute a probability or test a hypothesis, I would flip to a table of probabilities for the normal, t, chi-square, or F distribution and use it to compute a probability (area) or quantile (critical value). If the value I needed wasn't tabulated, I had to manually perform linear interpolation from two tabulated values. I had no choice: my calculator did not have support for these advanced functions. In contrast, kids today have it easy! When my son took AP statistics in high school, his handheld calculator (a TI-84, which costs about $100) could compute the PDF, CDF, and quantiles of all the important probability distributions. Consequently, his textbook did not include an appendix of statistical tables."
There used to be books of nothing but tables of logarithms and other mathematical tables, like trig functions. You used them when you needed more significant places in your answer than a slide rule could give you. I still have the one my dad used in college. They don't make those any more.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/768/
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
They still do.
CRC Handbook of Standard Mathematical Tables
https://www.amazon.com/Standar...