Formulae1.sea.hqx

						 Formulae 1 Demo
						Poliplus  Software
						85 Breckenridge #7
						Kitchener, Ontario
						Canada     N2B-3P8
						
						Carlos Bazzarella
						cbazzi@hookup.het

From the author's documentation:
		'Formulae 1' is a fast and compact Computer Algebra System 
		originally designed to run on a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).
		The program is only about 150k bytes long (including the Mac 
		overhead of ~31k bytes). Dynamic memory consumption is also 
		minimum. 'Formulae 1' features :
		
		- Fast automatic simplification of expressions containing 
		  symbols and functions.
		  
		- Graphical display of expressions with support for special
		  functions drawing (derivatives, integrals, square roots, etc)
		  and the Greek alphabet.
		  
		- Symbolic constants: "infinity", "pi", and "e" (appearing in 
		  symbol form)
		
		- Calculus support: derivatives, integrals (basic), limits with
		  plus and minus, Taylor series expansion
		  
		- Algebra support: Full matrix arithmetic with the following
		  functions: adj, det, minv, transpose
		  
		- Finite support:  sum, prod, factorial, perm and comb.
		
		- Dynamically extensible Mathematics Knowledge.
		
		This release of 'Formulae 1' contains a command line interface 
		combined with a more Mac-like User Interface. 
		
		The following is a small list of expressions simplified by 
		'Formulae 1'.
		
		Expression in		=>		Expression out
		-------------				--------------
		(a+b)^2                     a^2+(2*b)*a+b^2
		sqrt(a^5*b^2+a^4*b^2)       b*a^2*sqrt(1+a)
		sqrt(8*a^3)                 2*a*sqrt(2*a)
		diff(2*a*sqrt(2*a),a)       3*sqrt(2*a)
		cos(pi)+sin(3*pi/2)         -2
		5/6+2/3                     3/2
		diff(sin(x)/x,x)            (-sin(x)+x*cos(x))/x^2


This demo version runs 15 minutes then must be restarted.  This is an 
unfortunate restriction, since some of the commands are somewhat cryptic
so it takes nearly that long to get a good feel for what the software
can do.  

The interface is a command line with a display/work area for the results.
Once an object (e.g. expression) is displayed, it may be manipulated by
using the mouse in conjunction with a command tree and the command line.
The program includes a feature which allows the user to store new rules
for manipulation of the objects.  There appears to be no way to save 
sessions from one time till the next.

A 57-page manual is included.  This would be improved by a table of
contents or a searching facility in it.

Overall, this is a nice piece of software and well worth the modest
shareware fee.  It is small, yet quite powerful.

Tested on a PowerMac 7100 running system 7.5.1.  I experienced one crash
in several hours (broken up into 15-minute intervals) of working with it.