Tusanga’s Mate: A Powerful Online Symbolic Calculator
Tusanga’s Mate is a powerful online symbolic calculator. The interface is simple: Mainly just a text box where you can enter an expression to calculate. But once you dive into it, the power becomes apparent. Sure, it is no match for Maple, Mathematica, or MATLAB, but it is amazingly powerful — and it is available for free.
Enter an expression like “1+2*3″ and hit “Calculate”. Mate returns the answer 7. This is simple math, but Mate understands more complicated things. Here is an example of how to solve two Boolean equations over the variables x and y:
solveb({x and (x and y), (x or not x) and y},{x,y})
Mate can easily add roman numerals and give the result in roman numerals. Here we add 2005 and 3 in roman numerals to get the result MMVIII:
MMV|r + III|r in roman
You can, of course, also compute normal trig functions. Mate understands pi, so if you write:
sin(pi/3)
… you get the exact result:
((1/2)*sqrt(3))
Mate will keep the results in exact form as long as possible. It will only switch over to decimal notation as a last resort — or when you use the evalf function:
evalf(sin(pi/3))
The follow list describes some of what Mate can do:
- Computations using real and complex numbers.
- Work with intervals, vectors, sets, matrices, and bit vectors.
- Numbers can be represented in any base between 2 and 36, or you can use roman numerals.
- Define variables and functions. You can use conditionals (if-then-else) and loops (for-next and while-end).
- Graphically plot your data.
- Solve equations symbolically or numerically.
- Matrix factorization.
- Symbolic and numeric differentiation and integration.
- Statistically analysis of data sets.
The website has links to pages with documentation. I found the examples page very interesting. It contains ten examples with step-by-step descriptions of how to use Mate to solve them.
The website has convenient short cuts that may not be immediately apparent:
- Click on a previous expression or result and it will be copied into the text box. This is very convenient if you have a large expression and just want to change a small part of it before evaluating it again.
- Mate has support for sessions via a check box below the expression text box. Once in a session, subsequent computations can refer to previous ones. This is useful if you define functions or variables.
- Each computation sets the variable “ans” to the result of the computation. This makes it easy to do a series of computations that depend on each other — either in a session or via multiple expressions separated by semicolons.
- Use quick access keys (ALT+SHIFT+key in Firefox) to navigate the page. For example, “C” to calculate, “S” to start a session, “L” to log out of a session, and “E” to move focus to the expression text box.
Try Mate for free at http://www.tusanga.com.