I post this because it might be of general interest. We have tried it,
and it certainly works, although its a bit slow. Less certain is
whether it could support more than a few equations in any document.
Still, the concept is interesting. Where I think it DOES raise an issue
is that of standards. It is not obvious how standards will emerge to allow
applets to inter-communicate etc. Thus one cannot copy the symbolic
maths out of this applet and paste it into say Mathematica. Currently,
Sun apparently run a few subject specific groups, but whether that
amounts to a standards body is anyone's guess. Does anyone know
more about any Java standards process?
I might add that yesterday, another Applet, this time chemically
specific was announced, called Sketch and Fetch, which offers
an interface between a journal and a chemical database. I
rather suspect things are going to develop very rapidly in this
area, and we are all going to have to find the very fine balancing
act between maturing/implementing a selected technology,
and being at the cutting edge in responding to new developments.
> Features of EqnViewer:
> ----------------------
>
> - Uses very little memory and the code size is small.
>
> - Maintains Mathematical Structure for ease of connection
> to other systems.
>
> - Graphical display of Mathematical expressions.
>
> - Supports Greek alphabet in plain English form. Strings
> (Variables and Function Names) can be composed of mixed alphabets.
>
> - Supports arithmetic operators: +,-, /, *, ^. Relations: =, <>,
> <, >, <=, >=, =>, ==, :=. Symbolic constants: imag, inf, pi and e.
>
> - Functions support : supports any user supplied function such as:
> sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, cosh, sinh, tanh, exp, etc.
> and draws properly the following functions :
> logb, abs, deg, sqrt, nroot, plusminus, and perc.
>
> - Calculus support : Derivative, Integral, Limit (with plus and
> minus directions).
>
> - Algebra support: Matrix of unlimited size, transpose function.
>
> - Table support: Table of unlimited size.
>
> - Finite support: sum, prod, factorial, and comb.
>
>
> For more information surf to :
> http://www.hookup.net/~cbazza/EqnViewer.html
Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[log in to unmask]; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/
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