Re: Math project help

[Micah Yoder <LYoder@cyberis.net>]

Doug Loss wrote:
> 
> Over the past week or so I've had a couple of people contact me and ask
> how they could get involved in a mathematics project for Linux.  I've
> directed them to join our group and to check out the projects page.  I'm
> pretty sure both have done so.  Hilaire and Odile, your projects are the
> two that are specifically about math.  Could either of you use some
> help?  Someone else asked awhile ago (Bill Tihen, was it you?) about a
> Linux equivalent to Derive.  That might be something to look into.  If
> either of the people who asked me about math projects (or anyone else,
> for that matter) is interested in helping Hilaire or Odile in whatever
> ways they need or wants to take a stab at getting a Derive-equivalent
> started, please contact one of us directly or post something to this
> mailing list.

This is something I've been intending to do for a long time, and I'm
doing it now.

In the summer of 1993 I wrote a whole bunch of classes in Object Pascal
that can symbolically take a function, graph it, and symbollically take
its derivative.  It comes with a simple driver program.

For a long time I was sitting on it, hoping some opportunity would come
by to possibly sell it or use it for some other proprietary purpose, but
it never really happened and then I discovered open source.  So I'm just
now putting it out under the GPL.

It's known to work with Borland Pascal 7.  I tried to get it to work
under Free Pascal for Linux without success.  Perhaps we should run it
past those guys to see what would be required to make it work.

Also at one point I tried to improve on the design and convert it to
C++.  I have the partially completed code somewhere - I'll find it and
put it out also.

Basically, you run the program, type in a function of x, then select an
option to graph it, polar plot it, or take the derivative.  If you take
the derivative, you can print it out (in ASCII) or graph or polar plot
the function with its derivative.

I *love* the way it takes derivatives.  This is a GREAT example of OOP
at work, if I do say so myself.  :-)  I was amazed at how simple it was.

Its only real limitation is that it can't take the derivative of a
function that has x in an exponent.  The method of doing that is quite
complicated, and I never even totally mastered the art of doing it on
paper!  If someone can work that into the code, I'd be most
appreciative.

The driver program is NOT cleaned up..... it's just a menu, and not
everything works like it should, or in an obvious manner.  But for what
it's worth.....

What I'd like to see is a GTK port of it, a better driver program, and
some additional functionality.

Grab it from my SEUL page:

http://cvs.seul.org/~yoderm

Later,
Micah