What is Mathcad?

Mathcad combines a powerful technical computing environment centered on real math notation with a flexible, full-featured word processor and presentation tool. Mathcad enables users to enter, edit, and solve equations, and to visualize and communicate results graphically. Mathcad 8 Professional, a breakthrough in technical computing, is the only desktop application that combines the math, visualization and collaboration power required to meet the calculation, analysis, and reporting demands of professionals in every branch of engineering and scientific research as well as students in every quantitative discipline.

Enriched with a new compute engine, enhanced analytical power, and broader support for complex problem solving, Mathcad 8 Professional meets the computational requirements of more diverse users than ever . With enhanced 3-D graphics, Mathcad 8 delivers the speed, clarity, detail and control of a high performance workstation to an inexpensive Windows desktop. Additionally, sophisticated communication, collaboration and documentation tools improve efficiency and information sharing while helping to meet the reporting requirements for key industry standards such as ISO 9000. With complete support for OLE 2 automation, Mathcad 8 Professional provides an open and extensible environment able to interoperate fully with other desktop and engineering applications, including spreadsheets, CAD packages and technical products such as MATLAB® , Autodesk's AutoCAD® , Visio® and Intergraph's Imagineer™

[Mathcad Without Boundaries]   [More Math!]  
[Powerful New Solvers and Optimization Capabilities]   
[New IntelliMath™]    [OpenGL Graphics: Interactivity and Insight]   
 [Interoperability and Specification-driven Design]    [MathConnex]  
[Mathcad 8 in the Engineering Workplace] 
 [Publishing documnets and reports]   
[Finding Out About Mathcad 8]   [The Power to Share]

Math Without Boundaries

Mathcad worksheets blend numerical and symbolic math, straightforward arithmetic and sophisticated programming. Make a change, such as with a number or equation and Mathcad automatically updates the entire document including numerics, symbolic calculations, and graphs. The math palette at the edge of the screen symbolizes this integration, showing buttons for all the kinds of math and visualization available in Mathcad.

More Math!

Mathcad 8's function set is richer, with added power in statistics and combinatorics and lots of new special functions like Legendre, Laguerre, Airy, Bessels.......

Powerful new solvers and optimization capabilities

Mathcad 8 Professional delivers a complete toolkit for solving and optimization, including new nonlinear optimizers and a Linear Programming module. The user doesn't have to worry about choosing between different solvers: Mathcad selects the best algorithm and reports its choice along with the solution.

Here we show part of Mathcad 8's solution of a linear programming problem. This new module can solve linear programming problems with up to 200 variables and 500 constraints, and Mathcad's compact matrix notation makes it easy to specify the constraints. The next screen shows the solver context menu offering the user a choice of optimization routines.

New IntelliMath

New IntelliMath technology anticipates your next move, streamlining calculations and increasing productivity. Here IntelliMath's AutoSelect feature chooses the appropriate integration algorithm.

Numerical integration makes smart choices, handling difficult cases by automatically switching to special routines. Context menus provide convenient control for advanced users who want to make their own choices. For each of these difficult integrals, Mathcad automatically picks a suitable routine and returns a highly accurate answer. In the upper right corner you see the integration context menu which tells the user which routine was used.

OpenGL Graphics: Interactivity and Insight

Mathcad 8's new 3D graphics are a major step up in visualization power. With Mathcad 8 users can combine multiple objects in a single plot, zoom and spin surfaces with the mouse, and bring out shapes and details with multiple light sources and surface properties. These new interactive visualization tools give users deeper insight into their models and will speed the design process. Additionally, like every Mathcad plot, these beautiful 3D graphs can be animated using Mathcad's native animation feature, and the resulting AVI file can be pasted back into any Mathcad worksheet for viewing. Here is a small sampling of the 3D plots you can visualize with Mathcad 8:

Interoperability and Specification-driven Design

Mathcad is a full OLE 2 application which works as both client and server, providing drag-and-drop interchange, in-place-activiation and editing, and user-scriptable OLE 2 objects. Through component technology Mathcad can even share the solving and graphing capabilities of other programs. Mathcad 8 includes components for data I/O in a wide range of file formats including Excel, dbase, S-PLUS, AXUM, and MATLAB.

Here we show a data-fitting example where Mathcad integrates an Excel component as a computational resource. Mathcad feeds data into an Excel curve-fit and then brings the result back into Mathcd as a live graphic.

Mathcad's ability to share data and computations with engineering drawing programs like Integraph's Imagineer makes Mathcad 8 Professional an ideal platform for specification-driven design. CAD programs can describe the geometry of a design, but computing the effects of the system dimensions requires a program like Mathcad to handle the physics. The screen below shows how smoothly Mathcad handles this kind of design process. The user specifies pulley dimensions, which update the dimensioned Imagineer drawing. Then Mathcad pulls out other design values like belt length and contact area and computes the force required to prevent slippage. Change the pulley layout or the physical assumptions like the coefficient of friction and Mathcad recomputes the required belt tension.

MathConnex

Often the most convenient way to integrate engineering graphics and computation is through MathConnex, Mathcad's visual project design space. Here engineers can "wire" together diverse components to simulate data flow in a network or the dynamics of a machine part in operation. The screen below shows a MathConnex project that combines an Imagineer drawing of a cam and linkage assembly with a Mathcad component that computes and displays a dynamic graph of the changing velocity at one of the linkage joints.

Mathcad 8 in the Engineering Workplace

Mathcad's self-documenting style makes it an ideal platform for complex distributed design projects. Each Mathcad solution component becomes part of a project library that records every computation and design assumption. Mathcad's flexible formatting allows engineers to match standard document formats. For example, the worksheet below incorporates an engineering department header on each page so that it can be printed directly as design documentation. And for both internal and external review, Mathcad supports standards compliance by providing a complete audit trail in ordinary, easy-to-understand math notation. What you see in the worksheet tells you exactly how Mathcad carried out the calculations.

Publishing Documents and Reports

Engineers and educators can publish Mathcad worksheets in many different media and tailor the presentation of Mathcad results for different audiences. Mathcad's native formatting tools produce an attractive printout with headers and footers, bulleted and numbered lists, and full font support. Mathcad 8's new facilitiy for collapsing and locking computational areas of a worksheet lets users hide proprietary computational details when presenting results to clients and also bulletproof Mathcad worksheets for use in the field or on the shop floor. The screen below shows an example.

Finding Out More About Mathcad 8

The Resource Center is a rich and fully indexed set of live examples containing over 600 worksheets. Browsing the Resource center is the best way to get acquainted with Mathcad 8 Professional. Getting Started guides the novice with a keystroke-by-keystroke editing guide. Advanced Topics introduces some of Mathcad's high-end power, including differential equation solvers and the new optimizers. The QuickSheets provide templates for hundreds of common calculation and data analysis tasks, and like any Mathcad worksheet, they're live and immediately available to any user. Reference Tables include physical constants and formulas and a complete Periodic Table. Mathcad in Action profiles the range of technical disciplines that Mathcad supports, and if you visit the Web Library you'll find a large collection of working documents from Mathcad users all over the world. You can also check out the Collaboratory, an online forum for Mathcad users.

The Power to Share

Like each Resource Center worksheet, every Mathcad solution is a reusable nugget of solving power. Change any numerical parameter and the results update. Change some detail of any design function and the model recomputes. Every Mathcad user builds a library of solutions, and every solution can be adapted and shared, internally with co-workers or over the Web with the larger engineering and academic community. Sharing and reusability is easy; just select and drag items from a source to your own Mathcad worksheet.