[Jim C]

I realize this is a week late, but the best calculator ever made is the Hewlett-Packard HP48GX or the older but basically the same HP48SX. You can get these off of ebay. They will last forever. There is pretty much no reason to have any other calculator for serious math.

You can get a Palm Pilot emulator for these machines for free on the web. My Treo 650 emulating my HP48SX is faster than the calculator is.

If you want to do real math on a computer, get yourself a copy of Mathematica or Maple, both of which do symbolic math. I prefer Mathematica. If you are a student, you can get a copy of this for only a hundred bucks. Pretty much a no-brainer for anyone who wants to do sophisticated math in any subject (or even unsophisticated but tedious symbolic math).

FWIW,

Jim