Xah Lee, 1997, …,
This page lists some great math programs that i've used.
Mathematica from Wolfram Research Inc.. Version 6 released in 2007 is a break thru in technology. Mathematica is famous for the book A New Kind of Science, among other things. Mathematica is also the software running the new search engine: Wolfram alpha. Most mathematical images on XahLee.org is created with Mathematica. For detail about Mathematica, see: Mathematica.
Graphing Calculator by Ron Avitzur. Imagine your hand-held graphing calculator with the power of a desktop computer, then you get the idea of what this program is about.
Out of 10 or 20 programs that plots curves and surfaces i've tried, I think this is the best. Most versatile and most easy to use. Go download a demo and see for yourself. If you want a plotting program for your highschool or college installation, I suggest this one. URL: http://www.nucalc.com/. Mac OSX Win
The website A Visual Dictionary of Famous Plane Curve includes many files of Graphing Calculator.
K3DSurf. A program that plots surfaces or higher-dimensional manifolds. It can plot equations of 3 variables and parametric formulas for higher-dimension surfaces, and can do morph based on a variable. http://k3dsurf.sourceforge.net/. OSX Win linux
3D-XplorMath, by mathematician Richard Palais. 3D-XplorMath is a program for visualization of objects and processes in geometry. It can plot and animate surfaces, 2D/3D curves, complex valued functions, differential equations and others. The most eye-catching is its rendering of over 100 curious surfaces in differential geometry.
3D-XplorMath also includes some over one hundred expositions in PDF on various geometry topics on curves, surfaces, comlex mappings, fractals. The flaw with 3DXM is that it is very difficult to use. The menus are overflowing and non-standard, and user must read a big documentation to learn what various parameters mean and how to use them.
If you study or teach differential geometry, differential equations, or minimal surfaces, this is a excellent program. (Note: I'm a member of the 3D-XploreMath Consortium.)
URL: http://3d-xplormath.org/. MacOSXJava
• Mathematica package for converting 3D-XplorMath surface files to Mathematica graphics: 3dxm2mma.zip.
Spivak is a surface plotter by Jacob Siehler. (Spivak screenshot) One interesting feature is that users can drag a point inside a box, and the corresponding point on the surface moves dynamically. User can also turn on the drawing of tangent plane, tangent line, geodesic, and principal curvature lines at that point. There is also SpaceCurve program by the author. Website: http://home.wlu.edu/~siehlerj/computing/index.html (2005-11,2006-06) OSX
GrafEQ (screenshot) GrafEQ is a plane curve plotting program especially good at plotting implicit equations. Available for Mac and Windows. Fully functional demo is available at Pedagoguery Software http://www.peda.com/grafeq.
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(2004-10)
2004-01. The mathematician Paul Bourke has written a (commercial) app called SuperShape, that creates various odd-shaped 3-d models. http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/surfaces/supershape3d/ Mac Linux
Here is a list of Curves and Surface plotters for Windows
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