<p>There are many things I love about my shiny brand new Ti-89 Titanium calculator: automatic factoring, automatic fraction reduction, and all the dirty work that I appreciate not having to do. It's just, I can't figure out how to do any of the things I learned this year--like matrices--because it operates so differently than the Ti-83. I've been trying to look things up in the manual, but it doesn't really explain anything. So for anyone who bought this calculator recently--do you have any suggestions? Any convenient little tricks? Does it get easier? :eek:</p>
<p>The reference manual you received with the calculator is pretty useless.</p>
<p>Use this</a> massive one instead.</p>
<p>You may find [url=<a href="http://www.ti-89.org/forum/%5Dthis%5B/url">http://www.ti-89.org/forum/]this[/url</a>] an incredibly valuable resource as well.</p>
<p>Pretty much whatever you need is in the catalog. If you hover over something in the catalog, the list of parameters is at the bottom. That tends to help out a lot.</p>
<p>It takes practice. I admit the manual isn't too helpful (contains everything but is a pain to look thru). Also, ask friends who also own one and are more experienced for help. I have found this to be the most effective and efficient method.</p>
<p>General Rak: Thanks for the links; I'll check them out.</p>
<p>TropicalTriceps: I don't know why, but no one at my school seems to have them.</p>
<p>I still have a couple of days to figure it out before my exam...</p>
<p>I got one a few months ago and it took me about 3 weeks to get comfortable with it for what I needed(Math U.I.L. a Texas competition) and I love it now. I use it on the Calculator Test which is all about speed and is only 30 mins long, so I had to get pretty comfortable with it ;) .</p>
<p>Actually, pretty much any command you can't find on the keypad that you need will be in the "math" menu (shift + 5). If it's not there, you can look in the catalog.</p>
<p>Sigh: I can find the commands; I just don't know how to plug in the numbers (e.g. to get a matrix) because it's set up completely differently from the 83+.</p>
<p>Here is how you enter a matrix into the TI-89, if that's one thing you want to know...</p>
<p>2 9 6
1 4 3
2 2 0</p>
<p>^for a matrix like this you would enter it into the 89 as so:</p>
<p>[[2,9,6][1,4,3][2,2,0]]</p>
<p>but if you wanted to find the determinant then you would do this:</p>
<p>det([[2,9,6][1,4,3][2,2,0]])</p>
<p>Tell me if that helped and if you have anything else you want to know, I can give it a shot ;).</p>
<p>I figured out the first part, yes...but you know how on the 83+ you can type in [matrix A] and [matrix B] and then multiply [A]^-1** to solve a system of equations? That doesn't seem to work, at least not the way I tried to do it.</p>
<p>TI-titaniums are allowed on SATs, right?</p>
<p>just bought one today, fun calc but VERY confusing..
sorry im no help with matrices, i don't even know how to enter functions yet</p>
<p>
[quote]
TI-titaniums are allowed on SATs, right?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yes. And with any programs or data you want.</p>
<p>Hmm, I've never had the need to do that(I'm going to be a soph next year), so I don't know how to do that...</p>