Re: Pocket Sized Vertical (Portrait) Style Calculator Interest Message #16 Posted by Michael Kussmaul on 16 Oct 2011, 8:13 a.m., in response to message #15 by Thomas Radtke
I don't use my calculator for all things :-) My background is physics as well but I switched to computer science for my job.
For heavy math I use computer programs (simplifying formulas, taylor expansions, etc), so I would not enter a 8x8 matrix on a calculator, because a computer still offers much better editing capabilities.
But for smaller on-the-spot calculations a calculator is much better. E.g. for OpenGL programming you have 4x4 matrices and my calculator is useful for debugging them. I also wrote some small programs to help my work, e.g. Enter an OpenGL vector x,y,z and let it run through my transformation matrix and return the resulting vector. I also need simple trigonometry calculations all the time.
I think those are the main use cases for a calculator, I don't need fancy plotting, symbolic calculations (a computer is much better at those tasks). But I'm hooked to RPN and appreciate some simple programmable capabilities. And I like to do simple calculations with a physical device, so I don't have to switch context on my computer just to open the computer-calculator-app to compute a simple cosine...
I also have a 48G, and like it very much, but it's just to big to take with me all the time. So the 15c will fit in my already filled-up bag. I even would appreciate it the 15c would be half as thick :-)
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