What this scientific calculator can do
This is an expression calculator. You build a whole formula using the on-screen buttons, then press the equals button to evaluate it. The buttons are the digits 0 to 9, a decimal point, the four arithmetic signs, parentheses, a power button (^), a square root button, and sin, cos and tan.
Pressing sin, cos, tan or the square root button inserts the function name with an opening bracket, so you then type the number and close the bracket yourself. For instance, sqrt(16) followed by equals gives 4, and 2^10 gives 1024.
Radians, not degrees
The trigonometric buttons use radians. There is no degree mode and no pi button. That matters a lot: sin(30) does not return 0.5, because it treats 30 as 30 radians and gives about -0.988.
To work in degrees, convert first by multiplying by 3.14159265 and dividing by 180. For example, sin(30*3.14159265/180) gives a result very close to 0.5. A quick sanity check is that sin of about 1.5708 (half of pi) is 1.
How to use the calculator
- Click the buttons to build your expression. It appears in the small line at the top of the display.
- Use ( and ) to control the order of operations. Brackets must be balanced.
- Press = to see the answer in the larger line.
- Use the backspace button to remove the last character, or C to clear the expression and result.
There is no keyboard entry: the display is not a text box, so you need to click the buttons. The tool has no memory, history, or answer recall, so to reuse a result, retype it into the next expression.
Quirks and limits
Results come from the browser's ordinary floating-point arithmetic, so you will sometimes see tiny rounding artifacts, such as 0.1+0.2 showing 0.30000000000000004. That is normal for computers and not a mistake in your input. Results are not rounded or formatted.
If the expression is incomplete, brackets do not match, or something else cannot be evaluated, the display shows Error. Backspace removes one character at a time, so deleting "sqrt(" takes several presses. The power button is right-associative, so 2^3^2 means 2^(3^2). There is no logarithm, factorial, or inverse trig function. For counting binary values, see the Binary Calculator. For statistics on a list of numbers, the Average Calculator is a better fit.