Glasses, glass-ceramics, and ceramics are extremely versatile materials with a wide range of applications in numerous segments of modern society. To synthesize existing and new materials of this class, immense chemical combinations are possible from all the 80 useful elements of the periodic table.¹ However, one must determine which chemicals and how much of each to use to prepare any formulation and batch.

Although this is a routine task, it can be time consuming to search for the molar mass of all necessary elements. In addition, the process easily is subject to errors when transforming units of the material composition, such as from moles to weight percent. During 40 years of teaching and research and 20 years as a journal editor, Edgar D. Zanotto has seen many students and researchers err in such calculations—unfortunately, these errors sometimes are never detected or are found only in later stages of research, when authors discover that some property of the material (e.g., density, viscosity, coefficient of thermal expansion, or glass transition temperature) falls far short of the expected value.