This edition is about a new math tool that may be useful for normal users who wish to perform advanced level mathematic operations. Some of you might have tried Matlab or Octave while doing their course. Though these tools are more sophisticated, many novice users find it hard to use them.

Well, this editon of techblog talk about an alternative – Qalculate !

Its cool GUI (which is based on KDE or GTK+ for Gnome) is a multi-purpose calculator for the GNU/Linux systems. The solution has customizable functions and units. It also supports arbitrary precision and plotting of values (using GnuPlot). The supports the following basic operations (and logical operators):

- * / ^ E () && || ! < > >= <= != ~ & | << >> 

Its fool proof parsing of strings is really remarkable.

Though the solution is still in the development phase, I found it to be extremely stable and reliable.

Just like in octave, you can get all the errors in ‘its console’ (I mean verbose format). Further, Qalculate also supports the RPN (Reverse Polish notation) – a calculator input method- way of writing the statements. You can choose number bases from 2 to 36 according your requirement.

What makes this cool ?

I would say it is the GUI! But there are other reasons as well. It is an advanced level math tool (and still a desktop calculator!) that supports complex and infinite numbers. You can perform factorization, differentiation, integration  and simplification using this. And it can also solve equations and inequalities using it.

What more?

Well, support for SI units and prefixes  is something that can see in any advanced level math tool. But some tools may not be able to perform automatic conversion(to other units) and implicit conversion (by guessing the unit from its short form). These things can be done using Qalculate.

The Qalculate library has an extensive list of physical constants and elements, hence all the basic constants like pi, e etc are supported. if you are power user you can try exporting or importing CVS files and you can create, edit your statements and results in an XML file.

More information about the project is available in the project website. Go ahead and grab a copy of the software today!