In the early 70s there was an effort at HP to put a subset of Macsyma on a handheld device. This was crushed by their consultant W. Kahan, then a vocal and effective opponent of computer algebra. In a talk at Symsac 72 at IBM Yorktown, he claimed the only economically legitimate use for computers was beancounting, and likened Macsyma's symbolic integrator to "The Fisher Space Pen--the pen that writes underwater!" Joel Moses, then director of Macsyma, was completely cowed. TI bought Derive from Albert Rich to try to leverage sales of their handheld calculators with a scheme where Derive on an instructor's PC would download over a cable to a student's handheld. When this flopped, they pulled the plug on Derive development, which they were never really interested in. This is a shame--Derive had fans worldwide, and was improving rapidly. You can't have too much computer algebra. --rwg apg>Yes, but MuMath *actually* performs symbolic calculation (or that's the impression I got, anyway), whereas the Casio must perform an inverse lookup to convert from a decimal approximation to a symbolic expression. Sincerely, Adam P. Goucher
Your Casio is not the first "symbolic hand calculator"; MuMath was really the first:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuMATH
At 09:46 AM 5/6/2011, Adam P. Goucher wrote:
Today I received a Casio fx-85GT calculator as a present from a couple of my friends. It gives expressions in exact forms as an alternative to the ordinary decimal output. For example, enter:
sqrt(8)
and it will output:
2*sqrt(2)
Of course, I believed that the calculator was performing symbolic manipulation -- very impressive for a handheld scientific calculator!
However, I then decided to test it:
ln(640320^3+744)/sqrt(163)
Instead of displaying the correct answer, 3.14159265..., a prominent image of the Greek letter pi was rendered!
Hmm...
I'm waiting for a version that prints "stop trying to test my symbolic calculation facilities with well-known near-miss identities!"
On this topic, there is this comic:
Sincerely,
Adam P. Goucher