news 28 Posted February 9, 2009 Genius is a general purpose calculator with many advanced capabilities. To find out more go to: http://www.jirka.org/genius.html So that paper that references Genius is having trouble finding the right home. This also means it's getting really well polished. In other news, I have been using Genius for teaching a bit recently. Hence I've implemented the slopefield and vectorfield plots. I've had some trouble getting the slopefield line lengths right due to some confusion as to screen vs. logical units. The cool thing is that the book I'm using in the class has plots which have had the same error (the lines being normalized in logical, not screen, units). That made me feel not as stupid. In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects, it has been the original GNOME calculator before I got wild ideas about it doing absolutely everything. It is programmable, has a powerful language and handles many fun features including support for matrices, rational numbers, and nice 2D and 3D plotting. The GUI version requires GNOME2 (at least glib2 if you don't want a GUI) a recent enough GMP library and the MPFR library. You can still use the command line version if you prefer non-gui interface. Here are the news in 1.0.4: * Add slope and vector field plotting, with a graphical solver for the slope fields. * For graphing add SlopefieldPlot, VectorfieldPlot, SlopefieldDrawSolution, SlopefieldClearSolutions functions, and LinePlotDrawLegends, VectorfieldNormalized parameters. * Add "Draw legends" checkbox to lineplots * Add "Reset to original zoom" menuitem and add shortcuts for the zoom items * Add Eigenvectors (only for 2x2 matrices), Parse, Evaluate, AskString functions * Update the Mersenne prime list * Clicking and not dragging on the plot now does a reasonable zoom-in * Create plot window usable on my netbook * Fix the compare functions and hence for loops starting at numbers less than 0. * Fix the line plot scales * Fix bug labeling line plot functions and several other minor bugs in the graphing code. * Handle system errors (such as "out of file descriptors") more gracefully * Minor other fixes and cleanup * Translation updates (Hendrik Richter, Jesse Aviles, Djihed Afifi, Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle, Fábio Nogueira, Koos, Jonh Wendell, Carlos Eduardo Santos, Jorge Gonzalez, Daniel Nylander, et moi) http://download.gnome.org/sources/genius/1.0/ ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/ http://www.jirka.org/genius.html Genius is in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GARNOME and probably other distribution repositories, so check those. Usually you wan to install two packages: genius and gnome-genius (perhaps also gnome-common on some distros). Of course it will be a little bit before this version hits those servers ... Have fun, Jiri -- George There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. -- Peter Drucker _______________________________________________ Share this post Link to post
