maths

This saturday I had gone to berkeley to give my Math waiver exam for MBA. The questions were very calculation intensive. e.g. if after 15 years the value is 50k what would be the principal if the interest if 3% compounded annually. So this is an easy problem to solve but to get the exact answer you will need to compute hell lot. So after much trial, I figured I should take the calculator that was available. So I went to the exam co-ordinator got some funky looking calculator and did my maths. And, wow the answer were weird. I then tried testing some other stuff, 2+2 etc and it was always strange. Sometimes it seemed to work; sometimes not. So I thought it might be faulty caculator. I exchanged the calculator and weirdly this was funny too. So instead of giving the exams, I now was focussed on figuring out whats wrong with the calculator. There was manual also available; but I had to learn for myself.

After much fight and 30mins I realized it was postfix calculator. So 2+2=4 would need to be done as "2 enter 2 +". What a revelation. I was so amused with my finding that I did all things that I could do without calculator even with calculator.