Calculators

Calculators will be allowed on departmental exams, but not necessary. Some of the questions on the sample tests in the purple book require a calculator for their solution. This year such questions will either be modified to not require a calculator or omitted. Many students feel more secure having a calculator available when taking an exam, so feel free to bring one. Quizzes and homework will sometimes require a calculator. The textbook has some very nice exercises designed specifically for the TI-85 graphing calculator. You do not need to purchase such an expensive calculator for this course. These particular exercises have not been assigned. A scientific calculator, the cheapest one that can compute natural logarithms and exponentials, will be more than enough.

Microsoft Calculator

When taking the online quizzes, you may find it convenient to use the free calculator program built into WindowsNT at the public computing facilities. To run this program select the following items from the main menu:
    Start ->
        Programs ->
            Utilities ->
                Accessories ->
                    Calculator
This program will need to be switched to scientific mode in order to calculate logarithms and exponentials. To do this select "View" and then "Scientific" from the calculator menu.

Maple

Indiana Univeristy has a campus wide license for Maple, a general purpose mathematics program. This computer program can do all the calculus taught in this course, but it would take another course to learn how to use it. If you are interested in such things, I would strongly recommend attending the free Maple Jump Start lecture offered later this semester. The UCS Stat/Math Center can provide additional help with mathematical software at Indiana University. We will not be using Maple in M119, I just thought you might like to know about it.


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