Fun with wxMaxima: Semicircle Tangent

I have been working through some pre-calculus problems, and wxMaxima is a fun tool to play with:

wxMaxima provides a mathematical workbook environment. Maxima is a Computer Algebra System coded in Common Lisp back in the 80s.

In the screenshot you can see the semi-circle function f(x), and the function h(x, x_2) generates the tangent line for any point on the semicircle. The helpful feature exhibited here is partial application, allowing me to specify, e.g., h(x,20), to provide the graph with a new function, the tangent line attached to that point on the semi-circle. With a little more work, I could generalize h to allow passing in any semicircle function.

I wanted to upload the wxmx file, but wordpress.com does not permit upload that file type, for reasons that are beyond me.

Advertisement

1 thought on “Fun with wxMaxima: Semicircle Tangent”

Leave a Reply to AlaskaLinuxUser Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s