Geometry app three suggestions

[Alberto Candel]

(04-11-2014 10:57 PM)eried Wrote:  Hey Alberto thanks for sharing, can you elaborate what things made you use another geometry tool? I never used anything for geometry in school/university so I am a bit away from the field, but I thought these geometry tools were made for interacting "graphically" in the path of finding a numerical solution (like for example I always design small pieces in 3d to 3d-print and I always have to solve hidden angles of the objects, usually on a paper)

Does your suggestions replace the ones I suggested in the first post in "priority"? (from your view point)

Well, for me it was not about choosing one app over another. The course is Discrete and Computational Geometry, based on the book by Devadoss and ORourke with same title. The computational aspect of it is at the level of abstract algorithms, not actual implementation. I felt I was not competent enough to base it around the HP Prime, so whatever utilities I needed I felt more comfortable with Mathematica. Besides, Mathematica is readily available in our labs, and the course was being developed based on students interests and capabilities (we are not done yet).

But the Prime has lots of capabilities which could be made more obvious with some documentation from HP. True that there are lots of docs like HP Prime by Parisse but it would be nice to have an official hardcopy.

For example, just between my previous post and this one, I discovered that you can easily graph the convex hull of a set of points by going to the Geometry Symbolic view and typing, for example:

GH:=convexhull(1+3*i,1+9*i,1+11*i,3+6*i,4+9*i,6+6*i)
v GA:=polygon(convexhull(GH))

(v is the check mark)

and then go to Plot to view the convex hull. (This is related to exercise 4.7 in textbook above.) BTW, Mathematica complains when doing this hull.

Yes, I think our suggestions are aimed at different users, and I did not intend to replace yours; just thought to append a few others.