There are many mathematical and scientific applications.  I have been looking at as many as I can find, installing, evaluating, and frequently deleting them to make room for others.  Many are excellent, many are good, and some are so-so.  Here are the ones I consider the very best.
 

• Easy Calc.  There are scores and scores of scientific calculators for the Palm OS.  Their prices vary from $0 to $50.  Easy Calc is one of the best 2, in my view.  It uses color in a very helpful way (when graphing many functions together, for example).  It's a little quirky in its syntax, but very consistent, and has an incredible collection of built in functions (e.g., elliptic integrals). It does complex arithmetic, matrix operations, you name it. It's not RPN, unfortunately. It is fully programmable. The author is very committed to improving this, getting feedback, responds quickly to requests and comments, etc.  This is excellent all around. It's free.
• LyME. There are some times when I stumble upon an application that leaves me with the feeling that I am stealing something, that I ought to be paying for it -- and I would gladly pay for it.  This is one of them.  It is free and fabulous.  Life is good when you have LyME on your Palm.  It is basically MATLAB for your Palm.  Does it get much better than this?! Take a look at the Getting Started Guide to get a sense of some of what you can do.
• NeoCal. This is the best RPN calculator that I have found for the Palm.  Miss your trusty old HP?  This is great.  It is not a graphing calculator, though.  It has a very nice layout, customizable buttons, and some very nice conversion and time calculation utilities.
• Mtrx Calc.  This is the another good calculator.   Very similar to Easy Calc, but has a more intuitive syntax -- in fact, it uses MATLAB syntax :-) but is not RPN. Fully programmable. Shareware, $25.
• ProStats lets you do statistical analysis on data that is imported from a spreadsheet or directly written by the user.  Calculates standard deviations, means, medians, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals, plots histograms, etc.  Data sets cannot have more than 100 points.  Moving from one function to the next (e.g., from data to plots and back) seemed a little weird to me at first, but I got used to it.  It's a good application.
• There are many, many more calculator-like applications for the Palm OS.  Some are very specialized (e.g., StairsC to calculate what is needed for staircase building, and Crickometer which calculates the temperature by counting chirps from crickets). Others are improvements on the built-in "scientific" calculator.  Let me mention 2 more that are very good and have gotten a lot of attention.  One is MathU Pro, the other is Power One Graph.  MathU Pro is very good.  It does exactly what it claims, and it is available in many flavors.  All flavors have the same goal: to emulate some HP calculator on the Visor or Palm device.  They even allow you to get the exact look on the screen (if you have a color device). Yes, this allows you to continue a geeky love affair with your old calculator.  I happen to love my HP 48G calculator, but I think that emulating another product is misguided. Standalone calculators are one thing, but writing a Palm OS application from scratch in order to imitate what's already been done in the past is nearsighted.  The Palm OS allows us to do so much more, why limit what you can do?  The better vision is that adopted by the first two calculators above -- they approach a Visor/Palm device as an extension of a computer and they take advantage of it.
• The other calculator, Power One Graph (and the rest of the Power One family) is also very nice but nearsighted in my opinion. This family of calculators seems to have been roughly inspired by TI calculators.  They offer several versions: the graphing, scientific, financial, etc.  These are all separate apps, so that's a disadvantage but it's consistent with the idea of TI emulation (different models for different uses). TI calculators work well but they are clunky.  Power One maintains the constipated clunkiness (for example, you cannot move seamlessly between an algebraic expression of a function and its graph).  I find this approach limited for the same reasons I outline above: the Palm OS allows us to do so much more, why imitate products whose nature is limiting?

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last update Jan 14, 2003