​​Toshihide Maskawa first began using this slide rule as a hig | The Nobel Prize

​​Toshihide Maskawa first began using this slide rule as a high school student. At the age of 17, he used it just after the launch of the first ever satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, to calculate the trajectories of satellites and rockets.

Maskawa later delved deeper into the mathematics of quantum physics. In 1973, he obtained his first programmable calculator and his slide rule was allowed to retire. His interest in physics, however, endured and he was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
His old slide rule now lives at the @NobelPrizeMuseum.