The Best Graphing Calculator on the Market?

aaronbeekay asks: "I'm a sophomore in high school taking an honors chem course. I'm being forced to buy something handheld for a calculator (I've been using Qalculate! and GraphMonkey on my Thinkpad until now). I see people all around me with TIs and think 'there could be something so much better'. The low-res, monochrome display just isn't appealing to me for $100-150, and I'd like for it to last through college. Is there something I can use close to the same price range with better screen, more usable, and more powerful? Which high-tech calculators do you guys use?"

PDA?

[revlayle]

Do they make advanced graphing-calculator-like apps for them?

Let the Flaming Begin

[billdar]

Just like in HS and college, only the "Vi vs. Emacs" argument is more heated than "HP vs TI".

Especially when the HP48GX is the clear winner... /me ducks

Durability

[the eric conspiracy]

No question that the HP 48G is the one to get if you want something that will last. TI's or the Carly era HP's aren't as durable by a long shot. I have a small collection of HP's that has some models that date back to the 80's, and they all work quite well despite being 25 years old. One of the models I have is the 41cx which is distinguished for being carried on the early space shuttle missions for use to supplement the on-board computers.

If you do get a 48GX do be careful protecting the screen. The carrying case doesn't provide enough protection - I lost one because of that.

Re:Let the Flaming Begin

[mrchaotica]

At some point, a systematic sissification of generations of engineers occurred and they started using the crap that TI makes because...

...they had been forced to use TI calculators in high school, and that was what they were used to.

Don't take notes on a laptop

[rpbird]

You'll need it or a desktop for many things, but not for taking notes. A paper notebook and a pen or pencil are all you'll need for taking notes. Why? Note-taking isn't outlining, which is what most people think. Note-taking is a mnemonic system. It is not transcription. Someone good at note-taking will make small sketches, use arrows, circle items, use abbreviations, and skip items of little relevance. Properly used, note-taking can act like a filter, preserving the things you think you'll need to remember from the lecture, while skipping those irrelevancies every lecture has. There is one final, absolute advantage to note-taking over laptop transcription (or taping the lecture, another rookie mistake): your focus will be on what's said in class, not on fiddling with your laptop.

HP 48

[peacefinder]

Any model from this series of calculator is an excellent tool. (Except the HP48II, which is apparently a dog.)

The bad news is that HP's calculator division ain't what it used to be. The good news is that almost all HP calculators are extremely durable. I have personally worn out multiple HP calculator keypads, but it took about two years of heavy use to wear out each one. And by heavy use I don't mean mere homework... I mean 8 to 10 hour days at my job, where 60% of my job was to crunch numbers. (Yes this job was better suited to other hardware, but I worked with what I could get.) If you can find a used one that works at all, it should prove very durable.

If you can find one, a 48G or 48GX would be excellent.

(I am less impressed with the newer HP49 and its derivatives. It seemed to be a step backwards in usability to me, mainly because of the keypad layout. The all-important "enter" key is in a bad spot, and not double-sized.)

WHy any?

[sevenfactorial]

I'm a PhD student in math, and I have no idea why anyone would want to give a student a calculator. Much less a graphing calculator. It's fine as a means of removing tedium, but students need to do a lot of tedious things once or twice. In the calculus class I teach, I can't think of a single aspect of the class that would be improved by having a calculator.

Re:HP

[miskatonic alumnus]

For anyone who is planning to be a physical scientist or an engineer, a powerful calculator is a handicap and will hurt you in the long run. The ease of solving problems in low level math courses will come to haunt you when you take a course that includes something like Laplace transforms or complex analysis.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know how calculators are intended to be used. As I have told many a math student in my classes, calculators are no substitute for understanding how to work a problem. They are labor saving devices ... period. As far as being haunted in higher level courses, try numerical analysis sometime. As a student in that class, I had to write programs to solve differential equations, do numerical differentiation/integration, calculate eigenvalues/eigenvectors, and so on.

Re:HP

[cab15625]

Had an HP48SX for years. I used to use it in the lab for plotting data as I went (good way to see if you should keep going into the wee hours or scrap an experiment before it wastes too much time). It finally died about half way through my PhD (chemistry) when it had a bottle of THF spill on it.

They are rugged. My old one got dropped all over the place, crushed in a book bag on numerous occasions, you name it. It took some heavy duty organic solvents to finally kill it dead.

They have a truck load of built in libraries and functionality (from simple math, to symbolic calculus, and handling of units).

The replacement that I finally bought is a 48gII and it will even do fft's.

And don't let RPN scare you. Once you get the hang of it, RPN is great.

Now, if only I could get it to interface properly with my linux box ...

Re:RPN Baby!

[arodland]

It's about the computing power in your head, not on the calculator. With RPN, once you're used to it, you actually have to carry less state around, and it's easier to enter things properly and quickly. You just have to get used to thinking in what seems like a very funny way to start with.

Bah!

[gatzke]

Classic HP 15C. Graphing is for sissies. Best form factor ever (sideways, punch with both thumbs)

Maybe a 48SX if you really need graphing.

RPN forever!!!

Re:WHy any?

[DraconPern]

If you are that narrow minded, please don't teach that class. It's detrimental to your students.

Old School - TI-35 Plus

[davegust]

Got me through engineering school, and after 20 years, I still use it every day. It is just a basic calculator, but it has most of the advanced operations, including polar-rect, complex math, hex, oct, binary, basic statictics, deg-rad-grad, deg-min-sec.

And it only cost me about $25. I don't know if there is a modern equivalent.

I do agree that HP's postfix is easier to use, but I always used paper for my intermediate steps, which was usually required anyway.

My advice, forget the graphing and other crap. If you need to write code for your problem, you need a laptop.

Dave

Re:TI 89

[BrainInAJar]

In my experience, for undergrad... don't bother getting a calculator, I didn't use one

Either they're good enough you're not allowed to use them ever, or they just help you with the trivial things, and if you can't figure out what the graph of y=x^2+3 looks like, no calculator in the world will help you do well in even the most basic of first-year calculus classes

Graphing calculator--Keep it simple

[mchargmg]

Any of calculators are good, and most will do more than you will ever need. When in doubt keep it simple. I teach physics in college, and I can't tell you the number of times I see someone mess up a simple problem because they either use the calculator without thinking, or worse yet don't even know how to use it correctly.

Whatever you do, don't let the calculator become a crutch. I actually had a student tell me they could not tell me the integral of a sin because they did not have their calculator with them. Think before reaching for the calculator. I usually race all my students to the numerical answer in problems doing it in my head with scientific notation. Usually I beat the entire class, and most of the time at least half the class gets the wrong answer since they don't know how their calculator works.

When in doubt keep it simple.

Re:HP

[miskatonic alumnus]

The TI-89 can do anything taught in a math course well into a 300 level course, possibly four hundred.

And a trained human can do anything taught in any math course. To effectively use the TI-89, you have to (a) understand the problem, (b) know how to translate it into a form manageable by the calculator, and (c) enter the problem in such a manner that a meaningful result is produced.

Punching the equation into the calculator and getting an answer *even if it is only a small part of the actual problem* reduces drastically your ability to spot an error in any given step in a larger calculation.

Absolutely. But guess what? Nearly ANY institution that relies on computers does exactly this, every day. Do you really believe that there are paper audits of every computation involving every bit of datum used by NASA, Microsoft, AT&T, the NSA, etc., and that those audits are actually examined for errors?

So, restated: knowing how to work a problem is not enough. If you are teaching your students that it is, I believe that you are doing them a major disservice. Being so familiar with the problem that one can spot a mistake right in the middle of it, while focused on actually solving the problem, with nothing more than a pencil and basic scientific calculator at hand.. that is knowing enough.

A couple of points here:

1) Familiarity with a problem is a luxury that sharp undergraduates may enjoy. But, in the real world, there isn't a great demand for people to solve mathematical problems that have already been solved --- those problems can be repeatedly solved by computers.

2) You tacitly assume that students/graduates know how to use a calculator to solve the problem. In my experience, this is rarely the case. I won't elaborate on this except to say that until you've taken a course in numerical analysis, you really don't know how use a calculator.

Re:Mathematica+UMPC?

[WMD_88]

For some weird reason, this is among the funniest posts I've read here in a long time.

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Seriously dude...he wants a handheld calculator, and you respond with UMPC with Mathematica installed on it. Wow.

Re:PDA?

[skiflyer]

You might be a mathematical moron, but with the calculator you'll still get the answer right.

The reason why HP48 calculators are slow...

[Kulilin]

...is because they use a 4-bit custom microprocessor, the Saturn [wikipedia.org], which is clocked under 4 MHz for the HP48gx and even lower for older models. The bright side of the low clock speed is that HP48-series calculators are extremely power efficient. A pack of AAA batteries will keep you running for --literally-- years.

I doubt the new, ARM-based HP calculators can make such a claim.

Re:IA32 + Matlab R13

[SocratesJedi]

Nonsense; I upgraded from the TI-83 to the TI-89 and never looked back. The 83/84 series are underpowered calculators that lack a computer algebra system which severely limits their effectiveness. Further, for any type of complex function the display on the 83 is going to be extremely difficult to read while the 89 will render it in a format closer to how you would write it down on paper. For me, the 89 meant freedom from the mindless tedium of simply algebra and is a wonderful replacement for integral tables. I believe quite strongly that there is no glory in solving a problem a device could solve for you. If you already have mastered an integral or solving an algebraic equation, it's time to turn those functions over to a calculator so you can focus on bigger problems. The calculator isn't much harder than any of the others and the learning curve is going to be about the same if you're not already familiar with a TI calculator. The advice that you buy the less worthy 83/84 because "everyone is doing it" or the 89 is "too hard" is bad advice. Make an investment (both of money and of learning time) in the powerful 89 which will end up serving you far better in the long run.

Re:PDA?

[mkw87]

And he'll be able to take a test using that? I highly doubt it. The TI's and a few HP's, casio's, etc are some of the only calculators allowed to be used on lots of standardized testing (or a scientific calc and nothing more), so unless you feel like buying both its a waste. TI pretty much has a lock-in on the market in my area of the country (NW Pennsylvania).

On a brighter note, a TI-89 Titanium should last you through college.