Calculator test

[Idnarn]

(12-06-2024 10:27 PM)Commie Wrote:  Key in ln(-1) into your best calculator and hit return, your calculator should give pi.i, if it throws up a domain error try putting into complex rectangular mode and try again.

As expected, my hp15ce and ti30x pro mp throws up error 0, which didn't surprise me.

Cheers
Darren

• HP 15C CE and Nonpareil with the HP 15C both provide (0,3.141592654i) as the answer (the calculator has to be put in complex mode first by g SF 8).
• HP 12C "Gold" has the ln function and displays "Error 0". It has no advertised complex number support.
  

In the case of Casios:

• The wonderful fx-260 SOLAR II has no support for complex numbers and understandably displays "-E-". (However it's a wonderful little $10 pocket scientific calculator, and perhaps one of the very few that have an unshifted pi key - if you look at a photo, it's shifted, but you can press EXP without shifting and get pi when no other digits have been entered. Its solar cell generates sufficient power in warm white lit dimmer rooms at night and it has a cap that holds state for more than a minute without light. Immediate eval like yesteryear calculators - it's not RPN but close enough; none of that SVPAM entry.)
• fx-100MS II has support for complex numbers, but displays "Math ERROR" in complex mode.
• fx-CG50 has support for complex numbers and displays \pi i.
  

A more interesting test of complex numbers support is trying trigonometry on complex numbers.

The HP 15C CE performs sin(), cos(), tan() of complex numbers.

All of the fore-mentioned Casio calculators don't have any support for these functions on complex numbers. It's unexpected that Casio in this age still doesn't support it esp. on the latter two calculators that support complex numbers as it'd be trivial to implement considering everything else these calculators do. The fx-CG50 has the KhiCAS (xcas/giac) addon though which kinda makes up for it.