As my work on prime_pi and nth_prime is drawing to a close, William Stein and I have discussed the possibility of me making a graphical physics program to be included in Sage, the free open source math program.
An example of the desired functionality is to either with a few lines of code from within a Sage worksheet, or by clicking buttons in a graphical user interface (GUI) create a physics problem with components such as ramps, blocks, balls, pulleys, and springs, and processes such as motion (translational or rotational), collisions (elastic, inelastic, completely inelastic), and forces (friction, gravity, normal forces, driving forces, etc). I am expecting the VIGRE grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support my work, so I will be able to devote a lot of time to this project. I would like to obtain any and all suggestions for what features, functionality etc. could be included in this program. Please don't be afraid to contribute an idea. No suggestion is too large or too small. A few of the possible ideas that I have come up with so far: Allowing time to be solved for-e.g. exactly how long does it take for an event to occur, such as for velocity to reach 0. Using multi-precision arithmetic and error analysis to solve a problem to a specified accuracy-e.g. what is the velocity of an object at a certain time to the 100th decimal (for problems that don't include too much chaos). Creating a human readable physics problem specification language that allows the locations and properties of each component to be specified (perhaps similar to standard circuit specification languages). Allow matrices, systems of DEs, tables of values, etc that describe the physics problem to be accessed with Sage commands. Symbolic solving for problems that lend themselves to symbolic solving. Plotting variables such as velocity, kinetic energy etc. with respect to time. Plotting more complicated functions such as the amount of time a block takes to slide to the bottom of a ramp with respect to the ramp's angle. Make architecture easily extensible so new components can be made by the user Three dimensional graphics and problems (after 2D is finished) Kevin Stueve kstu...@uw.edu --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
