I’ve recently become interested in physical/mechanical computing devices and have been learning to do math on a Japanese abacus (known as a soroban) and I even purchased an old Pickett slide rule from the 1960s (an analog calculator) that I’ve been learning to use. I had no idea it would be as much fun as I’ve found it to be, and so I’ve been exploring other mechanical calculation devices.
This led me to the discovery of an old form of graphical calculator known as the nomogram. I suppose it’s somewhat ironic that modern AI tools have now made it feasible for me to easily create a package that can produce nomograms, and so I’ve been using Claude Code to put one together over the past few days, and I’d like to share it with the community for review and feedback (please!) before moving it into the registry.
Nomograms.jl makes it easy to build, solve, and draw nomograms. You provide it a function as well as the ranges for its inputs, and the package builds the chart for you and checks that it gives correct answers. If your function needs a special layout, like a curved scale, you can build it manually. Below are a few examples of nomograms you can make with the package:
There’s something strangely satisfying about being able to lay a straight edge across a graph printed on a piece of paper to perform calculations that most of us only learned to do on modern computers. And even if you don’t find it satisfying, there may be some real value in having a catalog of nomograms so that you can calculate important things in a post-apocalyptic world without electricity 
P.S. I also made a JavaScript app for learning the soroban here: Soroban — a 3D Japanese abacus, worked bead by bead