So today I wanna share some of the weird things I found in a maths book from 1942!!
But first let me tell you something about how I found it. One of my lifetime friends from Spain volunteers in a social bookshop, “Tuuu Libreria”.
The books are donated, and you can take any book you want by paying whatever you feel right. I truly like this project (really, being trillions of books there, how could I not?) because it gives access to knowledge to anyone, gives a second life to forgotten books, and saves paper and energy from the production costs.
Having said that, this is the book I found…
It is spanish, I know. I’ll do my best to translate the interesting stuff.
Title is: Tables of logarithms, trigonometry and interest rates.
Lots of pictures!
Probability tables!General trig. (Look at the weird arguments for which sine and cos are given in form of large root…so useless!)More (semi) useless stuff on trig. I bet you’d have to proof those identities before using them!Formuli for spherical trig!! This is interesting! (And also on my Vector and matrices exam coming soon)More on spherical triangles. This is getting messier!DATA ON MATHEMATICAL GEOGRAPHY. (?!) Dimensions of the Earth ellipsoid! And (decimal) logs of these numbers! (why?..Is this even maths or rather horrible aproximations? Why can’t they just put R for the Earh radius?)Decimal logs of integers from 1 to 30000!!!!Hundreds of pages like these one. Now useless because of calculators.More.Stuff on money and interest rates…Logs of sines, tangents, secants, cosines, cotangents and cosecants. Of all degrees from 1st cuadrant. 10 by 10 seconds from 0 to 3 degrees and 87 to 90. 30 by 30 seconds elsewhere. (These people where mad with logs!) Why would you even want to know the DECIMAL log of the cosec of 0º 27′ 40” (like not even measured on radians…)“Some usual numbers and their logs (again)”. I don’t know whether this makes me cry or laugh.Sines, cosines, tangents and cotangents. From 0 to 90º, minute by minute (by less accurate than before, thisat least might be even useful at some point!)Square and cubic roots of first 100 integers. And their logs. (As expected)Formuli for polihedron, triangle area, etcNon-primes less than 8358 (so random), non-divisible by 2,3,5 and 11, and their minimum divisor.
–That is the end–
Thank you for reading and I hope to see you soon here!
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Maria A. Gutierrez 
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