Doing algebra on the HP50g

[Peter Murphy]

Can anyone point me to a thorough discussion of how the 50g can be used in school algebra? The more I look, the more seeming secrets I see: COLLECT, DIV2, LAGRANGE and other commands can be used to do wonderful things, for example.

[peacecalc]

Hello Peter,

Quote:The more I look, the more seeming secrets I see:...

.

Show us in which problems you see secrets, then maybe somebody is able to whistle-blow in using the hp 50g.

Greetings
peacecalc

[Mark Hardman]

(04-02-2014 09:37 PM)Peter Murphy Wrote:  Can anyone point me to a thorough discussion of how the 50g can be used in school algebra? The more I look, the more seeming secrets I see: COLLECT, DIV2, LAGRANGE and other commands can be used to do wonderful things, for example.

You might start with the excellent Learning Modules provided on HP.com.

Of interest to you might be:

• Training Aid Introduction
• Using the Equation Writer
• Using the Equation Writer - part 2
• Solving for roots of polynomials and quadratics
• Curve Fitting
• Using the Numeric Solver to solve a formula
• The basics of plotting functions
• Calculations involving plots
• Numeric Differentiation
• Numeric integration
• Symbolic integration of polynomials
• Symbolic integration of trig functions
• Symbolic Differentiation
• Solving for zeroes of a function
  

Mark Hardman

[Peter Murphy]

What I'm looking for is materials from people who have used the 50g in teaching school algebra. I'd want to see many worked examples, as in the HP50g YouTube videos by L. Linares.

I would presume that in addition to applications to straightforward algebraic tasks, there would be examples in which the 50g is used to solve problems more difficult (or just more tedious) than one would routinely see in a school setting.

An example that taught me a lot (and took me a long time) was finding a formula for the sum 1^3 + 2^3 + . . . + n^3. For n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 the sums are 1, 9, 35, 100, 225. Applying the LAGRANGE command to those values yields the formula (x^4 + 2x^3 + x^2)/4; applying COLLECT to the numerator makes the formula [x^2(x+1)^2]/4, which is the form in which one usually sees it. (It's not a "secret" that LAGRANGE can do this, but seeing it done made the command's power explicit. And it took me a long time to discover that COLLECT often factors things better than FACTOR does.)

[Thomas Klemm]

(04-04-2014 06:54 PM)Peter Murphy Wrote:  An example that taught me a lot (and took me a long time) was finding a formula for the sum 1^3 + 2^3 + . . . + n^3. For n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 the sums are 1, 9, 35, 100, 225.

That should be: 1, 9, 36, 100, 225.

Cheers
Thomas