Daughter's Initiation Into RPN
 

Last year, daughter started HS and needed a graphing calculator. I wanted her to use a HP but she talked me into a TI84 like everyone else has. Said TI was stolen at the end of the year. So she needs a new one. Ah ha, my chance.

Dear daughter, you may take $120 from your laboriously accumulated summer earnings and buy yourself another TI84. That's 3 days of busting your butt, bussing dishes. Or you may learn to use this - heh heh - HP48G+. Well, some wailing, but she's now figuring out the HP. I think seeing the stack was kind of interesting.

My dad, the retired mathematician, has compared the TI84, TI-nSpire, HP48G, HP50G and pronounced the HP's superior. Something about being better with Laplace transformation and Fast Fourier tranforms. Yeah, whatever. Me, I just hate algebraic.

So, when I'm on the road and she calls me for help, I need to have a HP48G handy to tell her what buttons. I don't really want to carry one.

Solution: a $15 iPhone emulator. Some crazed German has written a Saturn processor emulator, downloaded the HP ROMs, created photo-perfect skins, and voila - a HP48G lives in my iPhone.

Good, as I've forgotten how to use the thing actually.

I see that Wolfram has a set of iPhone mathematics apps. Tempting, but she'd never be permitted to use one on tests.

Alas, I bet that today's bumbling HP will shut down the calculator biz before there is a successor to the HP50G.

Im still using my Ti-89 Titanium (Ti Ti get it ;)) Edition that I got back in 'ought four. Someone showed me how to solve quadratic equations way back when and by Senior year HS I had learned how to do integrals and derivatives. I haven't done any Laplace or Fourier on it yet.

The graphing was mainly for precalculus and calculus. I don't use the graphs much anymore.

Does HP have the same selection of games as Ti? I never got any for mine since I am not a video gamer anyway but people were really into the games in HS. I think it was stuff like Mario and Tetris.

Give her a slide rule, that won't get stolen.

Pick up a new-to-her TI84 at a pawn shop for $50...

That said, it is somewhat important for her to use the same interface, etc. as the instructor...

We still have a slide rule on the shelf here at work. Every once in a while I pull it ot of the leather case and admire it. Back in the stone ages when I went to high school the school had several 6 foot wide slide rules the teacher had hanging next to the black board.

That's right! I found one the other day I had in HS in the 60's.:eek:

I've got a slide rule and an abacus sitting on my desk at work. I'm better with the abacus than the slide rule.

My primary calculator to this day is my old HP 32S RPN or an RPN app that's very good that I have for my Android phone.

i own three 48Gx's.

my keypad broke on one of them, and i spent $125 getting it fixed. i talked to the tech, and he said he has a bunch of broken ones he stores away for parts. if mine was not repairable, he would have bought it from me for the parts. luckily, he could fix mine.

i found one mountian biking in the desert. some surveyor must have dropped it. i bought my third one from some engineer turned dot.commer. he sold it to me for $45. i figured, i can do RPN for life.

your daughter will be much faster and better off with the HP. i am not convinced the 48Gx has been replaced by a better unit yet. that thing flat out rocks.

Bingo... Class work is designed around what the instructor is using. The books generally show the same steps (as what the instructor is using). With a different interface, she'll odd-man out. It gets even worse if the class is large and the instructor is too busy to help out the person with the "different" calculator.

Yours might be a much better tool, but it won't be a better tool in this situation.

angela

completely disagree!

my college courses were all about the TI-85,. three calculus classes. i say about half of us all jumped on the HP bandwagon. sure the professor was doing things on the TI, and we were scrambling to keep up..for about two weeks. once we got the HP figured out, we were faster than the professor. we had to help each other occasionally, with a "how did you do that?"..

and the classmates that used the TI were actually behind, because they relied on simply following the professor.."push this button". we learned our machines where the TI folks memorized the movements.

i am not knocking TI. they are a great calculator. but that HP is very nice..especially with the add-on cards.

kinda like debating FORD versus CHEVY..sorry.

Well, not knowing the calculator well meant I sure learned how to do calculus by hand.:rolleyes:

i am glad the education system moved towards graphing calculators for calculus. seeing the graphs really lent a "real world" feel to the problems. it all made sense to me quickly.

i wish they could revamp diff eq. it really was really cookie cutter memory when it came to diff eq for me. i got an "A" but i really was lost the entire time about the concept. i just memorized the steps.

short of newton's law of cooling, i doubt i'll ever touch diff eq ever again in my life. and i am grateful for that.

Ah, but should you want to be a race engineer and tuning suspension the Laplace transform and linear differential equations are very, very common with spring-mass-damper systems.

oh god..you just gave me shivers.. UNCLE!

Makes me want a HP11C. Those things are expensive!!!

I think I still remember how to program one of those.

I still use my HP15c pretty regularly.

I can divide 4 x 2 on a slide rule.
Even on a round one!

Funny thing, I was just going through my old notebooks looking for something.. and I opened my DiffEq notebook and out fell a test that I got a 100 on..the problems were mixture and equilibrium problems, and my solutions looked like hieroglyphics to me..

I ended up with an A for the course, in my school that was the highest grade, there was no A+ which is what I should have received.

I always reduce the problem to the simplest form by hand, then use a calculator, I have both a Ti84, and an HP 48... In my position now I rarely ever have to use either..

You might want to check if the HP-48 is allowed for the SAT, ACT, or whatever the test-du-jour is.

Unfortunately, TI did a great job of marketing to education along with a couple of book publishers. Almost all the math books out here require a TI-84 to complete the homework verbatim. No wonder none of our kids really "know" math - they just get taught the "computation" side and very little theory (in my opinion).

I'm still working with my HP-42s. My Hp-41CX is dead. If anybody has another old HP-42s they're willing to part with, please PM.

I can't get my son to even touch the HP - it just "looks funny" to him. And the slide rules? Hah!

I hate the fact that kids are REQUIRED to use calculators for math these days. I think it doesn't really teach them math. It does teach them how to use the tool, and once you get into the "real world" you seldom have to do the hard stuff because you usually have tools to do that for you, but I think it's valuable that you have known how to do the hard stuff and understood it at some point in the past.

Except for some of the complex graphs, I can (could) do anything that I ever did in calc 1, 2 and 3 on paper with a pencil. Yes, being able to use a calc is nice, once you understand the stuff well enough to do it without.

I took some courses a few years ago, and I got a kick out of the way some of the younger members of the class approached the problems...

The teacher would be writing the problem on the whiteboard... and they would be feverishly trying to input the problem into to the Ti-85 instead of just taking a few seconds and looking at the problem..

When the problem is on paper, its like a game..play with it do some substitutions..

and finally enter into the calculator..

A different way of learning now I suppose

Ok, I am playing w/ the HP48G emulator and have forgotten how to use it.

How do I generate a 3D wireframe plot? Say z = sin(x) + y^2. I go to PLOT, choose WIREFRAME, enter the right side of the equation, but can't enter more than one independent variable.

Help.

I know, lame.

Have you seen what some of those old HPs go for these days?

Even my 15yo 32S could be 4x what I paid for it.

The question is - sell or hold?

Personally, I think a 15-year-old HP is still better than any other calc you can buy on the market today...

I have a HP41 - I think a CV? Not sure. I bought it because it seemed cool, haven't gotten around to learning it. Sits in the desk drawer.

I never got into programming HP calcs. I did program my old TI59, back in the day (magnetic cards, etc). One of these days I want to learn how to program one of these HPs, and write myself a set of simple financial apps that will be useful for my work. None of the finance packages actually include the stuff I'd want.

But, as a practical matter, I could set up a template spreadsheet for my iPhone that would do everything I want, with a much better interface and without having to learn anything new.

Also have a few HP12Cs and a HP11C. Also a HP200LX and a a HP25C that no longer work.

For iPhone (and maybe Android) users who are HP calc fans, look into the various HP emulators. They are great, use the original ROMs in many cases, have photo-accurate interfaces, and cost $15 vs $XXX for a physical calculator.

X is the independent..and Y is the other independent (aka dependent) isnt it? damn..been a long time. i could barely plot y=x^2 now.

seems like these days, i use my HP to figure out my fuel mileage.

y=X^2, easy, parabola, cup up... ;)

I used to have a program in my 32S to figure mileage. I was in college and pretty much always had my backback with my calc with me. Anytime I got gas, I'd pull up the program, enter my current mileage and gas purchased and it would spit out my mileage.

Geez, my son just started 7th grade and blackberry I-pods are mandatory at that school, along with all sorts of programs and apps.

I member when we weren't allowed to use a calcumalator.

i programmed the Moody diagram into my HP. nobody could figure out how we cranked out calculations so fast without having to reference that stupid chart. the HP is one heck of a calculator. i have the periodic table of the elements in there..comes in handy in chemistry, trying to figure out those orbitals.

And how often are you figuring out orbitals these days? :D

Yeah, I like the HP calcs too. RPN is almost universally superior to algebraic. I've never had one of HP's really fancy $300 calcs. I had a roommate with one that used it primarily to play minesweeper. Hahah

Along one axis it would be a parabola, along the other it would be a sine wave, think a ruffle potato chip. I can't remember how to specify two independent variables.