ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 1.0.16 the "Final exam time" release

[Jiri Lebl <jirka 5z com>]

Genius is a general purpose calculator with many advanced capabilities.
To find out more go to:
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

As I have been using genius for research and teaching again more this year, a
bunch of fixes and enhancements got in.  In fact, students in my PDE class
are just now taking their final exam.  Let's see if some of those in class
demonstrations with genius helped.

This time the list of changes is quite extensive.  There are some big
enhancements in terms of plotting, especially surfaces, see below.  There's
also a whole bunch of small to large fixes, including a couple of crashers.
And there's a few new functions.  There's also a slight change the
for/sum/prod loops behave with respect to floats and rounding errors.

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects, it has been the
original GNOME calculator before I got wild ideas about it doing absolutely
everything.  It is programmable, has a powerful language and handles many fun
features including support for matrices, rational numbers, and nice 2D and 3D
plotting.  The GUI version requires GNOME2 (at least glib2 if you don't want
a GUI) a recent enough GMP library and the MPFR library.  You can still use
the command line version if you prefer non-gui interface.

Here are the news in 1.0.16:

* Add SurfacePlotData and SurfacePlotDataGrid functions to draw arbitrary
  surface data, to allow more complicated 3d plots and 3d plots from data.
* Add LinePlotDrawAxisLabels and SurfacePlotDrawLegends parameters and
  add corresponding UI checkboxes
* Add ExportPlot function to export the current contents of the plot window
  to a file from GEL
* Surface plot now allows "fit dependent axis" automatically when
  z limits are unspecified.  And this is the default in the UI
* Add sinc, BesselJ0, BesselJ1, BesselJn, BesselY0, BesselY1, BesselYn functions
* Plot window slightly bigger (700x500 now) and there are wider
  side margins in the lineplot (2D) version to make tick labels always fit,
* In both 2D and 3D plots, tick labels now use scientific notation when
  needed to avoid ugly labels
* In surface plot the gradient always shows only the range of the function, so
  color is more useful when zoomed out.
* Simpler output when typing "help foo" when foo is neither defined nor
  documented.
* When for/sum/prod loops are in terms of floating point numbers and
  the final number is within 2^-20 times the step size of the goal,
  assume there were roundoff errors and still execute the body
* Handle wider matrices than 2^15 columns in expansion
* Fix flicker when plotting surfaces to allow animations with 3d plots
* Fix possible uninitialized crash when reading badly formed standard library
  (should never happen, but ...)
* Fix LinearRecursiveSequence and allow it to take vector for n
* Fix crash on uninitialized variables in conjugate transpose
* Fix crash on extreme zoom out or zoom in of a graph
* Fix derivatives of Im and Re
* Fix file chooser dialogs not starting in current directory
* Avoid double error about uninitialized variables
* Spelling fixes and documentation fixes (me, LucPionchon)
* Require MPFR at least 2.3.0
* Translation updates (Wolfgang Stoeggl, Daniel Mustieles, Matej Urbančič,
  Marek Černocký, Aleksej Kabanov, Andika Triwidada, Yuri Myasoedov,
  Miguel Rodriguez, Jiro Matsuzawa, Gustavo Jasso Ahuja, Bruno Brouard)

* During making of these changes the author (Jiri) was partially supported by
  NSF grant DMS 0900885 and the University of Wisconsin-Madison


http://download.gnome.org/sources/genius/1.0/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/genius/
http://www.jirka.org/genius.html

Genius is in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GARNOME, OpenSUSE, and probably other
distribution repositories, so check those.  Usually you want to install two
packages: genius and gnome-genius (perhaps also gnome-common on some
distros).  Of course, it will be a little bit before this version hits those
servers ...

Have fun,

Jiri


--
Jiri (George) Lebl, http://www.math.wisc.edu/~lebl/ or http://www.jirka.org/