non HP RPN calculators (was: Re: SemiOT: Mourning for

From: Carlos Murillo <cmurillo_at_emtelsa.multi.net.co>
Date: Tue Aug 21 07:15:38 2001

At 12:45 PM 8/19/01 -0500, Jeffrey wrote:
>It's not really Mathematica; it just the TI system. It is quite like
>Mathematica in that it provides symbolic manipulation, the main feature of
>Mathematica that most college students know or care about.

I must say that I haven't had any exposure to the TI system. However,
I usually prefer to deal with most math in old fashion: pencil and
paper, but usually after thinking about the nature and implications
of the problem at hand. Keeps me in shape. I've had students who
weren't in good shape after a couple of years of TI-assisted college,
even though they were decent at algebra when they first enrolled.
Note: I have nothing against using appropriate tools (symbolic math
in this case). But I do think that if you overdo it, as in never
using your brain again, then you definitely lose some of the training.

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers". Yes. But there
must be some gray matter behind the eyeballs looking at the screen
in order to be able to grasp the insight.

I was a hard-core Maple user back when I had to manipulate expressions
with thousands of terms in my misguided youth :-) . In fact, I started
using Macsyma (running on an Apollo DN3000, on topic). At the time
(or maybe a little after that era, I don't remember exact dates),
there was Mathematica on the Macs, but they would freeze all too often
because the computational kernel would eat all of the memory.
Anyway, the point that I wanted to make was that years after I found
that a different approach to the same problem would have resulted
in expressions that were much more manageable. My original research
was not wrong, but I had succeeded in making it more difficult than
necessary by using symbolic math.

carlos.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo_at_nospammers.ieee.org
Received on Tue Aug 21 2001 - 07:15:38 BST