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- a. Who wrote the software and contact information (preferably
- Internet and US. Mail addresses) for questions, comments, bug
- reports, etc.
-
- Curve was written by Michael Rogers, Dept. of Math and Computer
- Science, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002. He may be reached
- via electronic mail at mkr@cs.amherst.edu. Please let him know
- what you think and any problems which occur.
-
-
- b. The category that best describes the software type. (See
- *categories* below.)
-
- Mathematics.
-
-
- c. What the application does.
-
- Curve was written with the idea of letting the user explore plane
- geometry in a dynamical setting. To do this, one operates an
- apparatus with the mouse. If you drag a particular point, another
- point on the apparatus traces out a curve. There are two kinds
- of apparati referred to as synthetic apparati and analytic apparati.
- In synthetic apparati, the positions of points are defined by
- their relationship to other points. Moving some of the points
- will cause the positions of the other points to change. In analytic
- apparati, the positions of points are defined by formulae. One
- uses the mouse to trace out the curve defined by the formulae.
-
- Inspiration for this project was drawn from Robert Yates' book
- "Curves and Their Properties" and Brieskorn and Knoerrer's book
- "Plane Algebraic Curves." At one point it seems that people used
- to make apparati to construct curves out of physical material.
- We hope that this application may inspire you to do the same or
- that it may provide a reasonable substitute.
-
-
- d. What the application is used for at your institution (e.g. in a
- particular course, to illustrate a certain concept, research).
-
- Curve is used in courses to give students a "feel" for geometry.
- This could be used in calculus and geometry. For example, the
- Evolute apparatus gives a student an excellent intuitive feel for
- curvature; the MysticHexagon apparatus lets student explore the
- relationship of six points lying on a conic section; even the
- Function apparatus is useful at the beginning calculus level and
- gives a student understanding of the dynamical properties of a
- function.
-
-
- e. Which NeXT release your software was developed under (2.x or
- NeXTSTEP Pre-Release 3).
-
- Curve was developed on a NeXTstation running NEXTSTEP 2.1.
-
-
- f. Detailed installation instructions (if any).
-
- None.
-
-
- g. Any other comments you would like to add.
-
- More apparati are planned. Also there exists a version of this
- program which can dynamically load apparati (using objc_loadModules()).
- There will at some time be a reasonable description of the Apparatus
- class and how to program an apparatus. Other bell and whistles
- will also be added and minor improvements to the user interface.
-
-
-
- This version of Curve is distributed free of charge.
- All rights are reserved. There is no warranty.
-