GUYSGUYSGUYSGUYSGUYS I’m hyper.

You know what I would love to do (even though it would screw history and the rest of existence up because that’s how these things work)? I would love to take a graphing calculator and a calculus textbook, go back in time, and show them to Leibniz.

“Look!” I’d say. “See this little itty bitty machine? Look at all this nonsense it can do! Not only can I add, subtract, multiply, and divide in a fraction of a second, I can also find square roots, sines, cosines, and tangents, and GRAPH FUNCTIONS! This is your Step Reckoner on steroids. YOU helped pioneer this! EVERYBODY uses these now.

“And look at this textbook. This is what we use to teach calculus to people today. Let me show you some of these symbols. See what we’re using? dy/dx! And the elongated S! We’re still using YOUR symbols because they remain the clearest, easiest, most adaptable ones for this branch of math. AND THIS COMING FROM THE FAR-OFF YEAR OF 2013!!”

Ignoring the whole “somebody just time-traveled!” aspect, I think the calculator would really be the thing that would blow his mind. I mean, the Step Reckoner was massive and it just did the four basic operations. Plus, you know, the fact that the calculator now has this crazy-ass digital display thing. I’d totally help him take it apart and do the best I could explaining what the components were.

Of course I’d probably end up having to lean in reeeeeeeally close to him to do that.

Y’know.