Contributing to the Mathomatic free software project

Mathomatic is a completely original work and design, and has been under continual development since 1986 by me: George Gesslein II, with help from the Internet community. I am happy to support this project and will do my best to answer any and all questions about it, for free. Feedback and bug reports are very welcome and important too, and will allow me to make Mathomatic a better product. I have enjoyed working on Mathomatic and helping Mathomatic users.

Here is how you can help with Mathomatic. To donate money to help pay our development and hosting bill, and to encourage future development of Mathomatic, please mail a check or money order in U.S. dollars, payable to:

George Gesslein II
P.O. Box 224
Lansing, New York 14882-0224
USA

or you can donate electronically through PayPal, Flattr, or Amazon:

PayPal	Flattr	Amazon

Shop at Amazon.com using this link to earn me a commission with every purchase you make.

I ordered a new development computer for Mathomatic in July 2011 that cost me over $1000, since the HP Pavilion Linux desktop I was using quit running. The new computer is a high-end Linux desktop from System76. Here is my short review of it. Donations to help me pay for this fine piece of equipment will be greatly appreciated. I have made tons of important improvements to Mathomatic on it already.

Current working email addresses for George Gesslein II:

• gesslein@mathomatic.org is my main email address.
• georgegesslein@gmail.com is my PayPal email address.

I respectfully reply to each and every email I get. If you have sent me email and I didn't respond, it is because my email is not working. Please try my other email address or post a comment on the Mathomatic home page.

To donate services or patches to the Mathomatic project, please send me an email to discuss it. Mathomatic desperately needs a free software GUI, but I am unable to write that because I am currently battling thymic cancer and lack of energy, so any help with keeping Mathomatic (and me) alive is appreciated. My thanks go to everyone who has contributed to the Mathomatic code base, packaging, testing, etc. Mathomatic would not be possible without you.

Picture of me getting chemotherapy infusions.


&

Graphic of the CPU and cache topology of my new
Linux software development desktop from System76.

History of Mathomatic

Mathomatic development started in the year 1986 to test new ideas and as an experiment in computerized mathematics, originally using the Microsoft C compiler for DOS and a text editor as the only development tools. Versions 1 and 2 were published by Dynacomp of Rochester, New York in 1987 and 1988 as a scientific software product. Afterwards it was released as shareware and then emailware, with a 2D equation graphing program written in Microsoft C for DOS. At the turn of the century, Mathomatic was ported to the GNU C Compiler (gcc) under Linux and became free and open source software by publishing under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The graphing program was discontinued; 2D/3D graphing of equations is now accomplished with gnuplot.

Mathomatic is currently developed and maintained on a Ubuntu Linux x86-64-bit computer and now stands at 21,000 lines of code (including comments). There is a lot more work that can be done on it, I just need to feel well enough to do it.

The old Mathomatic changelogs have been reconstructed and are available here:

• From version 1.0 up to and including version 11.
• The version 12 changelog.
• The version 14 changelog.
• The latest changelog (version 15).

All of the above Mathomatic changelogs were written by George Gesslein II. There is a large gap between versions 11.4d and 12.4.0 because I have lost the archives containing those versions. All other versions are recorded uninterrupted.

Mathomatic has been twice ported to the Nintendo DS by others in the year 2006. Here is a picture of the Nintendo DSLinux port.

Mathomatic for DOS

Here I am making available the final DOS version 10.7b of Mathomatic with Microsoft C source code, for historical purposes, so you can see how far Mathomatic has progressed recently. It was released before October 29, 2003.

The above ZIP archive of Mathomatic for DOS also contains the final versions of the Mathomatic 2D equation graphing program (GRAPH) and Personal Harmonograph Simulator (PHS) for DOS, which are small, automatically artistic, graphics programs. GRAPH was the Mathomatic graph command; it plots equations with their asymptotes. PHS simulates a museum harmonograph, drawing pretty circular patterns that you can control. PHS is courtesy of the Ithaca Sciencenter, which had me write a science museum version of this program called "Harmos".

History of George Gesslein II

My life was spent alone, trying to learn and understand and be and do good. I suffered constantly. Here is my resume.

Other utilities by me

mycmp is a binary file comparison command-line utility that compares any number of files specified on the command-line, displaying and optionally hard linking together identical files. This is the binary file comparison utility I use. It displays some useful statistics and is free software.

Hosting

Mathomatic.org is currently mostly hosted on Panix.com of New York City, with some generously donated hosting from Plumeyer.org. All of Mathomatic.org is exactly duplicated on the mirror site mathomatic.orgserve.de/math, which is a Debian Linux based web server, donated by Jochen Plumeyer. Both hosting services have been very professional, reliable, and helpful. Mathomatic.com and Mathomatic.net simply redirect to Mathomatic.org now.