MathMate v1.1, from Science and Engineering Software Experts Limited, is a shareware scientific calculator with some impressive capabilities. And although it is obviously aimed at scientists and engineers, it has plenty of features that make it attractive as a general purpose calculator.

An installation program is provided, making installation effortless. MathMate is a VX-REXX program, and thus requires the VX-REXX runtime library VROBJ.DLL (included in the MathMate zip archive). The installation program creates a MathMate folder on the desktop that contains a MathMate program object and a help file object. The on-line documentation is complete and well-organized.

When started, MathMate comes up in calculator mode (gif 12k), giving you a powerful scientific calculator with the expected functions such as trigonometric (as well as inverse, hyperbolic, and inverse hyperbolic) functions, exponential, natural and common logarithms, and square root. Also available are integer, signum, fraction, and absolute value functions. MathMate also provides very convenient access to the following fundamental physical and mathematical constants: e, pi, Euler gamma, speed of light, electron charge and mass, proton mass, Avogadro's number, Planck's constant, the fine structure constant, the Rydberg constant for infinite mass, Boltzmann's constant, the universal gravitation constant, the Bohr magneton, and the acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface. All constants are given in CGS units. A nice addition to the program would be the ability to switch to MKS units, or even better, user-specified units.

MathMate's integration mode (gif 12k) is very handy when you need to numerically calculate a one-dimensional definite integral. The precision of the calculations can be controlled by a dialog window with a slider. The limits of integration and parameter values are entered in standard entryfields. Unfortunately, the calculator buttons for the physical constants will not place values in these entryfields, so if you need to enter a constant like pi as an integration limit, you have to manually type its value into the entryfield. Even entering "PI" does not work, and when you are working in double precision, you have to do a lot of unnecessary typing. On the positive side though, MathMate's integration is very snappy. The author's have obviously made efficiency a top priority when coding the calculation engine.

In addition to an integration mode, MathMate also has a summation mode that performs a partial sum of a series, with inputs similar to integration mode. The final program mode is an equation mode that solves for the roots of an equation between specified limits.

MathMate also includes some special mathematical functions in addition to the ones listed above. These functions include Bessel functions, Fresnel integrals, Gamma functions, and Legendre polynomials among others. And if you don't know what these functions are, the on-line help gives the full details (gif 6.8k) on all of them.

If you are not a scientist or engineer, MathMate's built-in functions probably have little value to you, but do not dismiss the program itself. Even as a basic calculator, which we all need at times, MathMate excels. The user interface is clean and easy to use, and you can save calculations to disk should you need them later. MathMate refers to calculation sessions as "Protocols" and they are saved as ordinary text files. The program includes a protocol viewer, but it seems a bit incomplete. Copying text from the viewer is very easy, but the documentation refers to a seemingly nonexistent "Send" function to send calculations from the viewer to the main window.

So, in spite of a few minor shortcomings (no minimize button on the main window) and errors (such as e and pi being reversed in the on-line documentation), MathMate is a piece of software that I highly recommend. It is available on the Hobbes ftp site as mathmate.zip. The registration fee is $25 US or 40 DM. Registration gets you LaTeX or Postscript documentation as well as additional software that enables you to use the calculation engine in your own programs.

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