Which Calculator to get for college?

pencilinablender
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:20:10 +0000

I’d suggest getting a TI-89 Titanium. It’s a little expensive ($88.99 - $138.60 on Amazon), but you definitely get what you pay for. Several of the features (like differentiation, integration, implicit differentiation, etc.) you’ll use almost immediately in Calc 1. Even as an engineer, you’ll find some its other features extremely helpful later on in your undergrad career - e.g, it can work with partial derivatives, ODE’s and PDE’s, matrices, etc. (all things engineering majors encounter at some point). The one drawback is that many professors (math professors, especially) will not let you use anything beyond a TI-84 on tests and quizzes. Despite that, it’s still a good investment.

Aside from calculators, though, there’s also several programs you can buy for your PC. I use [Mathematica for Students](http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/education/students/) myself. In addition to doing everything the TI-89 can do, it can: solve advanced problems step-by-step; set parameters for graphs, tables, etc., which helps develop an intuition for what you’re doing; collect data and organize it into plots, tables, etc. (e.g, I could type in something like “U.S Population from 1900-2010”, “Nutritional information for a Big Mac and Fries”, “Number of cows in England”, “Distance between Titan and Alpha Centauri”, etc. and it would not only collect the data but organize and represent the data appropriately); and create presentations (handy if you plan on doing research). However, I wouldn’t suggest buying a program like that until you’re further along in your undergrad career. In my opinion, it’s really too much for a first/second year student, but you can always keep it in mind and maybe buy it down the road.

Anyway, hope that helped!