7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators

An anonymous reader writes "One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function. However, the calculators featured in this article are significantly more sophisticated with the ability to process difficult mathematical functions, to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, and much more. Occasionally, the calculator tool provided with an operating system did not engender any confidence. The classic example being the calculator shipped with Windows 3.1 which could not even reliably subtract two numbers. Rest assured, the calculators listed below are of precision quality."

Comments

They left out RPL/2

[jdb2]

While technically not a "calculator", unless you run it in interactive mode, RPL/2 is one of the oldest and most mature of any HP28/48/49/50 style UserRPL interpreters.

What makes it so awesome is its ability to interface with the OS via POSIX compliant commands -- it's almost like using your HP48 as a scripting tool for Unix.Too bad they didn't mention it.

jdb2

hp48

[tantrum]

I'm amazed they left out the hp48 emulator. It was an amazing calculator, and the emulator does exactly what it it is supposed to do - everything.

It did everything a calculator is supposed to do, and it was _almost_ able to boil my coffee.

After my 10 years working with programming, this is still the environment i love the most. Actually it is probably the only thing i still know the exact location of at all times.

I love beeing a geek :)

I might be biased, but...

[Enleth]

I prefer the Python interactive shell and GNU Octave (or any other Matlab-compatible environment, including Matlab itself) for numerical calculations, Asymptote for plots and other methods of data visualisation, Maxima when a CAS is in order and LaTeX to turn all the stuff generated by those packages into something readable and publishable.

Throw in some scripted links between all those tools, a few functions from Peter Acklam's Matlab Utilities, your favourite function for converting a matrix to a LaTeX table and saving it into a file in a single call, a few exec()-equivalents here and there, and you'll get a rig that auto-regenerates your report/publication/thesis/shopping list/whatever else you might have been doing, in a single run of a single program, should you spot a mistake somewhere deep in the calculations, or a typo in the input.

For one, I don't think I'll ever understand people who use spreadsheets. And copy their results to the word processor. And then spot a mistake in a formula, fix it and proceed to copy the new, correct results from scratch. And then spot a typo in the data.

Why biased? Well, I'm studying control systems and robotics. It's all about task automation. Besides, everything in this field involves using Matlab for something, and just about everyone in the academia (the technical side of it, at least) is using LaTeX, so you just kind of get used to using those two for just about anything after a while, and automating everything with scripts.

Of course, the above assumes somtheing more complicated than a few basic operations in a single line. We're talking about sophisticated calculators here. For simple tasks I'm just using Google...