3D-XplorMath 10.1 (Mac)

Overview:

3D-XplorMath (formerly 3D-Filmstrip) is a highly interactive program for exploring the visual aspects of the exciting and beautiful universe of mathematical objects and processes. It has been under continual development for over ten years by an international team of renowned mathematical researchers and educators, the 3DFS Consortium. It was originally developed for use in research and in teaching at the college and university level, but recently the Consortium has (with support from the National Science Foundation) been working hard to make it easy and enjoyable to use by anyone with mathematical curiosity and an appreciation for the visual and logical beauty of mathematics. You should think of 3D-XplorMath as an interactive museum of beautiful mathematical artifacts. This museum contains literally hundreds of well-known (and some not so well-known) mathematical objects, arranged logically into a number of "galleries", referred to as Categories. These include: Surfaces, Planar Curves, Space Curves, Polyhedra, Conformal Maps, Dynamical Systems, Waves, and (the latest) Fractals & Chaos. The "3D" in its name refers to the fact that 3D objects can be viewed in strikingly realistic stereo vision. 3D-XplorMath differs from programs such as Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab that provide visualization back-ends for viewing objects, but require the user to first program the object and its visualization. 3D-XplorMath emphasizes ease of use and does not even require the user to have a pre-existing knowledge of the mathematical definition of an object in order to see it. Every mathematical object in its massive collection is not only pre-programmed, but also has carefully chosen default parameters and associated animations. Merely selecting a gallery object by its name from a menu presents an excellent initial view of the object. The user may then optionally use simple dialogs, controls, and menu choices to customize and animate this default view, perhaps after first learning about its background by choosing About This Object from the Documentation menu. Users can also create and animate new objects on their own by entering simple algebraic formulas into dialogs. All objects, including user defined objects can be saved, in several graphic formats, and animations can be saved as Quicktime movies. The members of The 3DFS Consortium were of course highly pleased that all the VersionTracker users who downloaded version 10.0 and then reviewed it, gave the program five stars. However, we were disappointed that more users did not write back to us with suggestions. We know the program can always be improved, and many important suggested improvements have come from enthusiastic users. So while The 3DFS Consortium is not asking for a monetary payment to use 3D-XplorMath, we are asking for payment of a different sort: Please send us reports of any difficulties you have with the program and any suggestions you have for new mathematical objects or for improving the user interface and the documentation. Either send email to palais@brandeis.edu, or write your comments as a VersionTracker review.

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