Scientific Calculator
A full scientific calculator: trigonometry in degrees or radians, logarithms, powers, roots, factorials, memory and a running history. Type with the keypad or your keyboard — a live preview shows the answer as you go.
Your calculations appear here. Select one to use its answer again.
How to use this calculator
- Type the expression the way you would write it.Press sin then 30 for sin(30) — the closing bracket is added for you, shown faintly until you type it.
- Check the preview under the expression. It updates on every key press, so you can catch a mistake before pressing =.
- Press = to finish. The answer is saved as Ans and added to the history. Typing a number next starts a fresh calculation; typing an operator carries on from the answer.
- Pick answers out of the history to reuse them in a new calculation.
What each key does
xʸ — raise to any power
x², x³ — square, cube
ʸ√x — y-th root: 3 ʸ√ 8 = 2
√x, ∛x — square and cube root
eˣ, 10ˣ — exponentials
ln, log — natural and base-10 log
sin⁻¹, cos⁻¹, tan⁻¹ — inverse trig
1/x — reciprocal
n! — factorial, up to 170!
EXP — × 10 to the power: 3 EXP 8
RND — random number from 0 to 1
± — flip the sign of the last number
Worked examples
Height of a tree from its shadow angle
You stand 20 m from a tree and the top is 35° above the horizon.
- Make sure Deg is selected.
- Type 20 × tan(35) and press =.
- Height ≈ 14.004 m (plus your eye height)
Compound growth
What does $5,000 grow to at 6% a year for 12 years?
- Type 5000 × 1.06 xʸ 12 and press =.
- Result: $10,060.98
Half-life
How long until 80% of a sample with a 5,730-year half-life has decayed?
- Solve 0.2 = 0.5^(t ÷ 5730), so t = 5730 × ln(0.2) ÷ ln(0.5).
- Result: about 13,305 years
Frequently asked questions
Use degrees for everyday geometry, surveying and most school problems, where a right angle is 90. Use radians for calculus, physics formulas and anything involving π directly, where a right angle is π/2.
The Deg / Rad switch changes how sin, cos and tan read their input and how sin⁻¹, cos⁻¹ and tan⁻¹ report their answer. Getting it wrong is the most common reason a trig answer looks strange: sin(30) is 0.5 in degrees but about −0.988 in radians.
Powers are worked out before the minus sign, the same convention used in algebra and by most scientific calculators. −2² means −(2²), which is −4.
To square a negative number, put it in brackets: (−2)² is 4.
Brackets first, then factorials, squares and other postfix operations, then powers and roots (right to left, so 2^3^2 is 2^9), then the minus sign in front of a number, then multiplication and division, and finally addition and subtraction, each left to right.
A number written straight before a bracket, constant or function is multiplied, so 2π, 3(4 + 1) and 2sin(30) all work as you would write them on paper.
EXP enters scientific notation: 6.02 EXP 23 is 6.02 × 10²³. Ans stands for the result of the last calculation, so you can chain steps without retyping numbers.
M+ adds the current result to memory, M− subtracts it, and MR inserts the stored value. An M appears in the display while memory holds anything other than zero.
% divides the number before it by 100, so 15% is 0.15 and 200 × 15% is 30. It does not add a percentage on to a total the way some shop calculators do — for that, write 200 × (1 + 15%), or use the percentage calculator.
Yes. Digits, the decimal point, + − * / ^ ( ) ! and % type directly. Enter or = evaluates, Backspace deletes, and Escape clears. A few letters are shortcuts: s, c and t for sin, cos and tan, l for log, n for ln, r for square root, p for π and e for e. Shift+E enters an exponent.
Calculations use standard double-precision floating point, which is good to about 15 or 16 significant digits. Results are shown to 15 significant digits, which hides the tiny rounding residue that would otherwise make 0.1 + 0.2 display as 0.30000000000000004.
In degree mode, sin, cos and tan return exact values at multiples of 30° and 45°, so sin(180) is exactly 0 rather than a microscopic number.