What is Theorist 2.0?

Theorist, one of the first symbolic-math programs for the Mac, has found a new home at Waterloo Maple Software. Theorist 2.0 offers a nice assortment of features that make it a first choice for mathematical exploration by students.

In fact, for a student taking a freshman calculus class in college, this is a great application. It doesn’t automatically resolve complicated symbolic integrals — you have to do some manipulation yourself — hut this very fact makes it a great complement to traditional classroom work. However, as a tool for a practicing theoretical physicist, Theorist wouldn’t be very useful. One can deduce the relative target market by comparing Theorist’s manuals, where Bessel functions are considered an advanced topic, with the manual for Wolfram Research’s Mathematica, where tensor algebra is considered advanced.

But even though Theorist isn’t intended for high-end users, it has a great strength: its interface. Once you get accustomed to the sometimes quirky palette conventions (what would you guess the hammer icon does? The lightning flash?), you can enter an equation with just a few clicks, graph or simplify the equation with a single click, and tinker with it endlessly. The interface encourages exploration, and the tutorial makes this exploration easy and entertaining and clearly reflects lots of feedback from users. Maple’s claim that Theorist 2.0’s “click-and-solve” technique means you don’t have to learn a programming language to do useful math work is justified.

On a Power Mac 6100, Theorist calculates sums of 20,000 terms in a series as quickly as you can press the return key. Perhaps even more impressive than its calculation powers is Theorist’s willingness to run on any Mac, from a Plus up. This makes symbolic math accessible to high-school classes, many of which don’t have the hardware to run behemoths like Mathematica.

Theorist’s excellent table feature is a joy to use at Power Mac speeds, and graphing is an instant, one-click operation. Symbolic math works significantly more slowly than numerics, however, and the built-in symbolic-expression library hasn’t been expanded much over that of Theorist 1.5. For example, if you want to do most fancy trig integrals, you have to set up integration by parts yourself. Still, if you’re taking a calculus course, that’s part of your education.

The Last Word With Theorist, your old SE can solve serious engineering math problems, and your Power Mac will rip through them as fast as you can click. It doesn’t handle the kind of big problems that call for Maple or Mathematica, but you can learn Theorist in an afternoon and take on any challenges in the undergraduate math curriculum.

Seiter, Charles. (June 1995). Theorist 2.0. Macworld. (pg. 79).

Download Theorist 2.0 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II