Anyone know of a good calc program for college math?

[lexmark]

Howdy! Im taking a electronics class in college and have been told by my professor that basically my good ol' TI-83 is a POS scrap metal and i need a ti-85 or higher to solve ac circuits. I have a test next friday, and i need to be able to get some practice in before the test. Anyone know of a pc calculator program that adds phasors/vectors in polar form? I cant find one on google..

as far as the calc, im trying to get one, but in the meantime i want to try to get some practice today. Thank you so much ATers!

 

[duragezic]

I had no problems at all using my 83+ for my circuit analysis class. Phasors/vectors in polar form are easy to do by hand, and if theres anything you cant do just convert to complex rectangular form, which the 83 can handle just fine, then back to polar form using the formulas for magnitude ( M = sqrt(real^2 + complex ^2), phase=arctan(complex/real))

 

[Bucks]

Perhaps you could get a discount through your school for Maple. It can do almost any math problem, though I haven't tried any circuit problems. I am sure you can do them on it though

 

[Slicedbread]

You can search on ticalc.org or buy maple, but I think maple is out of your price range.

 

[duragezic]

OP, do you have a few examples of some problems you are trying to work to prepare for the test? Perhaps you might find them easy enough to manipulate by hand then use any calculator to get a result. I've never really encountered a problem yet that required something more. I suck at integrating pretty much, I did well in calc but now when it comes to apply it a couple years later I can only do very simple integrations. So for example when we were on convolution last semester, I didnt know wtf was going on anyway, so the 89 would be no good if i couldn't set it up right with the right boundaries, etc.

 

[Wuzup101]

I know my school sells mathematica, matlab, maple, etc... for very low prices to students. I think I paid $90 for my copy of matlab/simulink. I prefer to use a TI-89 on tests, but most of the stuff that I can do by hand is done by hand because it's faster than losing my train of thought to set up the calc to do it. However, I always use the 89 for simple math - I tend to screw that up more than I'd care to on a test. It's funny trying to explain to an econ prof that you're not cheating by using a TI-89... you just don't have anything else.