Meta Calculator is an advanced online calculator that anyone with a browser can use, there’s also an iphone/ipad version, but this review will focus on the free online version. (Flash player is required). Meta Calculator is aptly named. It packs quite a large set of features and should satisfy the needs of any high school /college student. It could also be useful for a teacher since, among other things, the calculator lets you save images of your graphs. This application is really four calculators in one—a scientific one, graphing calc, statistics calculator and a matrices/vector calculator. Let’s look at each one in detail.
The graphing calculator emulates almost all of the functionality of any Ti-83—it graphs up to 5 equations or inequalities, finds their intersections, produces a table a values and has a point trace plotter –a neat feature that lets you drag a point along the graph of any of your equations. You can also zoom in/zoom out and pan around the graph by dragging it with your mouse. A stand out feature is the ability to save any of your graphs as .png files. Just hit the ‘save graph’ button, and you will download the graph and its equations. This is a feature that any student or teacher could appreciate—the next time you need a graph for a presentation or a worksheet for your math lesson, just type the equation and hit ‘save graph.’
The scientific calculator has all of the basic functions and buttons you’d expect including sin,cos, sin-1, cosh, log and more. Plus it has some more advanced features including a button to calculate the least common multiple, permutations, combinations and—possibly most powerful of all—a linear equations solver that lets you input up to 6 equations with either two or three variables and the solver will calculate the solutions.
The matrices/vector calculator lets you do pretty much anything you might want to do to a matrix like calculate its determinant, its inverse. Also, you can add, subtract, multiply and transpose matrices. Similar features are available for vectors.
Last but definitely not least is the statistics calculator. This has the basics like calculating quartiles, mean, median, mode as well as the correlation coefficient and almost any kind of regression (linear, quadratic, exponential, cubic , Power, Logarithmic, Natural Logarithmic). The program, maybe most impressively, computes student 1 or 2-Tailed T-Tests (paired and unpaired). I was unable to find any calculators online that let you enter raw data and calculate T-tests so this is quite a rare online find.
Overall, this calculator should serve the needs of almost any high school student/college student, but it would also be quite useful for anyone who needs to create graphs for their equations—you can just hop on the internet browse to the webpage and download the graph!
