Can You Build a Scientific Calculator with ONE Button? | Symbolic Computation

Every scientific calculator contains dozens of different mathematical operations: addition, multiplication, exponentials, logarithms, trigonometric functions, and many more. But what if they were all secretly doing the same thing? What if they were just different expressions of a single underlying operation? Is it possible to replace every elementary mathematical function with a single operation, much like how the NAND gate in digital language can implement every Boolean circuit? In this video, we explore a surprising new result that suggests exactly that and build the intuition behind why a seemingly ordinary operation can generate the entire repertoire of elementary mathematics. Sources: Andrzej Odrzywolek, "All elementary functions from a single binary operator": arxiv.org/abs/2603.21852 Zenodo archival record cited in the paper: zenodo.org/records/19183008 Newer Zenodo record listed from the repository release family: zenodo.org/records/19762318 AI-Feynman symbolic regression reference: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay2631 PySR / SymbolicRegression.jl overview: arxiv.org/abs/2305.01582 --- About: I enjoy programming and solving hard problems. This channel is a log of what I've learned. Tools used: manim python