Coming Soon: LiveMath for Mac OS X

[RacerX]

Within the next month LiveMath for Mac OS X should be released. LiveMath (originally called Theorist) is one of the best math programs I have ever used. I was very happy to see that LiveMath's Mac roots are still very strong (as reported in this MacCentral article). The only other program that I hope to see someday soon on Mac OS X is GeomView (which was originally written for NEXTSTEP).

This program is a very important one to me personally because it was Theorist which brought me to the Mac platform in the late 80's.

 

[Valrus]

So fill us in! What's so great about LiveMath? I ask this because I'm a math major, and we use Mathematica at my school, and I and many other people more knowledgable than myself can't stand it.

Edit: I'd look it up myself, but it's late right now, and when it's not late I have to compete with my family members for the phone line since we're on dial-up. I am curious though.

-the valrus

 

[RacerX]

Really? What area do you specialize in? My area of expertise is differential geometry and differential topology (and some mathematical physics on the side).

It has been quite a few years since the last time I tried to use Mathematica, but it required almost as much effort to learn how to use as TeX (and actually filled the programing requirement for students who needed programing at my school). Theorist didn't require you to learn all that much in order for it to be a powerful tool. Having problem with an integral or derivative? Type them in as you would expect to see them, and Theorist solves (most of) them.

The copy I have my cousin and I bought back in 1990 because we both thought it was the best thing we had ever seen. The fact that it is useful from the moment that you start working with it was something no other math program we had seen was able to provide.

Here are some screen shots of examples of the 13 year old version at work (I imagine that after that much time, they have made quite a few improvements).

 

[RacerX]

Oh, and a little off topic (but not to far), here is what Geomview looks like. This was developed at the NSF Geometry Center in the early 90s (about the same time I was there, but I didn't have anything to do with it), and runs on NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and SGI IRIX operating systems.

 

[Valrus]

Oop, maybe I should have been more specific. I'm not quite far enough along to have a specialty area. To be precise, I just finished my second year of undergraduate college, and my first non-specifically-required course was Algebraic Structures, which is Macalester's weird name for abstract algebra. That was pretty fun stuff.

I love TeX. Ever since I discovered it I've written almost all my papers in it, and I didn't think it was that hard to learn (the syntax, at least). As for the actual software, TeXShop is fantastic and free.

Maybe I can encourage the Math/CS department to check out Theorist, since it seems like all anyone uses Mathematica for is lower-level calculus and linear algebra. If Theorist is a lot easier to use that would be nice. But one of our professors worked on Mathematica for a while, I think, so he might be sort of adverse to our replacing it.

-the valrus

 

[RacerX]

Cool Valrus, I have a ton of other questions... but this really isn't the best forum for them.

Lets move this to this thread.