ANNOUNCE: GENIUS 1.0.18 the "Strange attractions" 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

A new genius release is now a yearly tradition.  A lot of small changes and
fixes always accumulate.  This time, while working on a new section for the
differential equations book, it became necessary to plot point clouds (such
as a strange attractor), so this is new.  Also if you plot something like
sqrt(x) and normally you'd get an annoying dialog with errors about complex
values, those errors now go by default into the console and we simply show
a message on the plot window about this.  This version also adds functions
that make it possible to do smoother animations.  There are also a few other
new functions and a whole bunch of fixes.

In any case, Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects going back to late
1997.  It was 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 1.0.18:

* New general functions: KroneckerProduct (alias TensorProduct), NewtonsMethod,
  HalleysMethod, LambertW, LambertWm1, NonzeroColumns, NonzeroElements,
  DisplayVariables, PrintTable, SetElement, SetVElement
* New plotting functions: PlotCanvasFreeze/PlotCanvasThaw to improve flicker
  if doing animations with genius, and LinePlotDrawPoints function to draw just
  points without the line
* While plotting errors are no longer forced into a dialog, and presence
  of errors is indicated in the graph window below the graph
* Allow setting color in LinePlotDrawLine with RGB vector.
* When the vector building notation is done with floats and the final
  number is within 2^-20 times the step size of the goal,
  assume there were roundoff errors and still add it, just like for loops,
  so something like 1.0:0.1:3.0 now works
* Implement subsecond precision in wait function.
* Fix memory corruption error triggered in nested floating point
  for loops with a floating point step
* Few minor bug fixes and fix some more compile warnings in gtkextra
* Streamline the compiled file format (saves about 30kb)
* A few improvements to the documentation (yelp sucks donkeyballs!
  Just had to say that).
* Translation updates (Rafael Ferreira, Marek Černocký, Daniel Mustieles,
  Wolfgang Stöggl, Miguel Rodriguez Nuñez, Piotr Drąg, Wylmer Wang,
  Dimitris Spingos, Enrico Nicoletto, Matej Urbančič)

* During making of these changes the author (Jiri) was partially supported by
  NSF grant DMS 1362337 and the Oklahoma State University

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.okstate.edu/~lebl/ or http://www.jirka.org/