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Comment by hyperthesis | Hacker News Reader

Wait, you're saying that calculators now do symbolic differentiation and integration (like sympy and mathematica)? Kids today...

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The TI-Nspire CAS (computer algebra system) can do very complicated symbolic antidifferentiation, like ones that you'd do by hand with repeated integration-by-parts. It can even solve many kinds of simple ODEs!

My handheld calculator, a Ti-89, did basic symbolic differentiation (and maybe integration, it's been awhile) in the late 90's.

Oh hey, I have a TI-89 Titanium. It can emulate the gameboy advance playing Pokémon Red at 30FPS. :)

lol, thats awesome. i suppose i shouldn't be surprised. Can do a heck of a lot with a couple dollars of silicon these days.

And they mark up the price to $200 (that's what the device costed... a 68k in 2017...)

Iirc they had to lobby college board to change the rules to allow colored screens on exams since the black and white screen was more expensive than the colored ones since no one made the black and white ones anymore

I'd be open to allowing smartphones/tablets on all tests so long as there's no internet. Note taking is more important then ever imo, and knowing how to apply things rather than doing he computational machinery in your head is the more valuable skill to spend time developing (not that we shouldn't teach mental computation at all, just de focus it)

> Iirc they had to lobby college board to change the rules to allow colored screens on exams since the black and white screen was more expensive than the colored ones since no one made the black and white ones anymore

Shouldn't hike the prices on the super old TI-89 Titanium unless the screen (and the CPU, and etc.) is really that much more expensive now.

That’s how I got through calculus. I learned how to integrate/differentiate once, then programmed those operations into my TI-82 using whatever awful version of basic those things supported.

You programmed SYMBOLIC integration on a TI-82 but couldn't do it by hand? Are you sure you are remembering that right? Symbol integration is non-trivial.

Almost certainly not. It happened over 20 years ago so my memory is fuzzy, but I’d guess I still had to tell it which formula I wanted to integrate with. So to study I just had to be able to identify the correct formula. You might argue that’s the not much harder than by hand, but I was exceedingly lazy (still am, but now married with kids so it’s buried deep haha).

My recent TI-nspire calculator had a track pad mouse built in…

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