Converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and Visa Versa

The odd looking fellow to the left is Anders Celsius. He's the famous Swedish astronomer responsible for, at least to Americans, the confusing time and temperature marquees that are now the norm. You know the ones I'm talking about. You're sweating your butt off and, when you glance at the marquee to see just how hot it is - it's 33°. This makes no sense so you stand there awhile waiting for the marquee to display the temperature in Fahrenheit; a manner that makes sense. If you're in Canada or Mexico, you'll be waiting a long time.

In Anders' day, astronomers were expected to be experts in all things sky. Meaning that, aside from studying the heavenly bodies, astronomers were the weathermen of the day. Now, Gabriel Fahrenheit had, in 1714, developed his temperature measurement scale in which 180 degrees separated the freezing and boiling points of water. Zero was kind of arbitrary; it was simply the coldest temperature he could create using the crude methods then available to him. Since the use of this scale caused consternation, of a mathematical nature, to 18th century meteorologists; Anders developed a measurement scale in which the easily divisible number of 100° separated the solid and steam states of liquid water.

For some reason Anders' original Centigrade scale, the name by which it was known for years, set the boiling point of water at 0° while the freezing point was 100°. Since this was counter-intuitive, all the scientists got together after Anders death in 1744, and reversed it. Okay, knowing all this is kind of interesting but you're here to discover an easy method of converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and visa versa. Read on...