Note the new series of pages on Autograph – including the new web version.

A major announcement at La Salle Education’s Maths Conference #21 today –

Autograph for graphing and geometry is now part of the La Salle Education family and with the backing of La Salle Complete Maths, Autograph (version 5) is now available free to everyone forever. Teachers and students can download the software.

The dynamic graphing software has 4 modes, Statistics, 2D Graphing, 3D Graphing, and, introduced in version 4, Complex Numbers.

Perfect timing for myself and my Further Maths students as we are just about to study Complex Numbers. It is very simple to enter complex numbers and menu options mean that various operations are easily and quickly demonstrated, including displaying the nth roots of a complex number. A comprehensive manual is available – see the Help menu. Manuals can also be found on the Autograph site including useful summaries.

More for the Further Mathematicians, we can easily show transformations in 2D and 3D, use pre-sets or enter a matrix for a transformation .

Or very simply show your chosen number of terms of the Maclaurin series for sin x (select the graph, right click, choose create and select Maclaurin series).

Autograph is also excellent for illustrating the Newton Raphson method – something which will be very useful in teaching Numerical Methods for A Level.

So many excellent features are available – this is a powerful and sophisticated program. Note that a web application version is coming too.

Time to get studying the manuals and tutorials!
If you are unfamiliar with Autograph, you may like this training material by Simon Woodhead, Alan Catley, Craig Barton and Douglas Butler to get started.