CALCULA guides

Two series of guides: one explains how to use the notebook, the other gives the formulas of each field.

Using the notebook

One guide per feature: what it is, how to use it, and an example to replay taken from a template shipped with the product.

• The reactive page

  One cell per calculation, shared variables, and everything that depends on them recomputing — with the Steps and How? panels

• Units and uncertainties

  Write “1.250 ± 0.002 m”, let the unit and the uncertainty cross the calculation, read each measurement's contribution

• Formulas and chains

  The “≡ Selection” button, the glossary of 2,500 formulas, and “Find a chain”, which strings together the formulas leading to a quantity

• Data and fitting

  Import a CSV or a spreadsheet, turn it into variables, fit a model and read its residuals

• ODEs and optimisation

  Solve a differential equation, read its phase portrait, find a root, minimise a function

• The Python cell

  Real Python in the document, seeing the notebook's variables, with libraries installed on demand

• Subject packs

  Chemistry, biology, geosciences, engineering, pharmacology, finance — a field's operations, with their templates

• Export and sharing

  .supercalc, LaTeX, Jupyter, Word, PDF, and a share link that holds the whole notebook with no server

• Offline and updates

  Why the notebook works without a network from the second visit on, and how a new version arrives

Formulas, by field

The essential formulas of each field, a worked example with numbers, and how to type them into the notebook.

• Algebra & calculus

  Solve equations and systems, differentiate, integrate, take limits and work with matrices

• Trigonometry & geometry

  The unit circle, identities, angles, areas and volumes, vectors and distances

• Statistics & probability

  Mean, median, standard deviation, linear regression, probability distributions and tests

• Physics

  Mechanics, energy, waves, electricity, thermodynamics and relativity

• Chemistry

  Molarity, dilution, pH, chemical equilibria, kinetics and thermochemistry

• Orbital mechanics

  Kepler's laws, the rocket equation, Hohmann transfers, vis-viva, coordinates and GPS distances

• Radiometric dating

  Radioactive decay, half-life, carbon-14 dating and isotope pairs

• Number theory

  GCD, LCM, prime factorisation, congruences and modular arithmetic

• Conversions & units

  Number bases (binary, hexadecimal), physical units and classical ciphers

Beyond these guides, a glossary of 2,500 formulas — 2,272 of them directly computable — is available inside the application itself, with an explanatory tooltip for each.