Some basics of MATHCAD

The capabilities of Mathcad software center around things it can do with an equation or other mathematical expression:

• enter and display the expression
• perform symbolic manipulations (solve, simplify, factor)
• graph a mathematical function
• numerically evaluate an expression
• display, print, and save results.    

Its numerical capabilities will be the main interest in this course, in particular, finding inverses and other calculations involving matrices.

Notes on some other software.  Mathcad is in the genre of software that also includes MATLAB  and MATHEMATICA, but they are more expensive, and Mathcad is far more than adequate for our purposes.  Mathcad and its relatives also have some statistical data analysis features, but not as extensive as those of statistical software such as STATA or SPSS.  And despite the letters CAD in its name, Mathcad is not a computer aided design  program.

Some operations in Mathcad

• add.  2+3
• subtract.  6-4
• multiply.  5*2 (displayed as centered dot)
• divide.  6/3
• to power.  2^8 (displayed as superscript)
• two kinds of equals
  • assign.  name : expression (displayed as name := expression)   a:2+3+4 (displayed as a := 2+3+4)
  • evaluate.  2+3+4 =  (displayed as 2+3+4 = 9) 
• matrix.  matrixname : (pulldown Insert, Matrix) and fill in placeholders.
• matrix addition, subtraction, multiplication.  same symbols as for scalars.
• matrix inverse.  Type  inversename : matrixname ^ -1

Save your results for next time.  Pulldown File, SaveAs, and save to your floppy or zip disk.  After saving your file, remove your disk from the lab machine.