Choosing a Calculator for Physics and Engineering

[loobloke]

Hi there

I'm doing a double degree in physics and mech engineering.

Up until now, I've been using my good old Ti-83 and has served me well but me thinks it may be time to maybe invest in a good calculator for the future.

I would prefer to stay with the TI brand since I'm very comfortable with using it, and I'm looking at 2 in particular.

http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_ti89ti.html
http://education.ti.com/calculators/products/US/Nspire-Family/

Anyone got any recommendations?

 

[KrisOhn]

One of my friends has the Ti89, it is a bloody amazing calculator. Everything you could ever need to do, including creating programs in C (I believe) can be done.

 

[Mark44]

One of my friends has the Ti89, it is a bloody amazing calculator. Everything you could ever need to do, including creating programs in C (I believe) can be done.

Yes, you can create programs in C or M68000 assembly or TI-89 BASIC - see http://www.ti-89.org/faq.html#topic42 . Pretty amazing!

 

[TriKri]

Myself I'm not familiar with the TI series, but I go with the HP calculators. They have one thing that I don't know any other calculator that has - reversed Polish notation. I love it, it's just super. Forget about keeping track of how many parenthesis you have written, and if you want to use a variable again later, just duplicate it on the stack and you won't have to save it as a variable in the calculator's memory. Besides you can change the font size (thus you can choose how much information that should fit on the screen vs. readability of the letters), which I don't think you can do on the TI calculators.

I have an HP 50g; it comes with a nice leather case. You can choose either to work in approximation mode, or exact mode, in which it will work with symbols and expressions and not turn anything into floating point numbers. Reversed Polish notation can be turned off to make it work like a normal calculator, as many people seem to have trouble understanding how it works. However that's just an extra reason to have it turned on! ;)

 

[Duderonimous]

Just get a TI-86 they are very versatile and practical. They have a lot of fans so many useful programs have been written for it. Anything beyond a TI-86, like graphing a 3-D object or something along those lines, you should be using a software on the computer.