Cinderella (software)
Encyclopedia
Cinderella is a proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

 interactive geometry software
Interactive geometry software
Interactive geometry software are computer programs which allow one to create and then manipulate geometric constructions, primarily in plane geometry. In most IGS, one starts construction by putting a few points and using them to define new objects such as lines, circles or other points...

, written in Java programming language.

History

Cinderella was initially developed by Jürgen Richter-Gebert and Henry Crapo and was used to input incidence theorems and conjectures for automatic theorem proving using the binomial proving method by Richter-Gebert. The initial software was created in Objective-C
Objective-C
Objective-C is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language.Today, it is used primarily on Apple's Mac OS X and iOS: two environments derived from the OpenStep standard, though not compliant with it...

 on the NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...

 platform.

In 1996, the software was rewritten in Java from scratch by Jürgen Richter-Gebert and Ulrich Kortenkamp. It still included the binomial prover, but was not suitable for classroom teaching as it still was prototypical. This version won the Multimedia Innovation Award at Learntec '97 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Due to this attention the German educational software publisher Heureka-Klett
Heureka-Klett
Heureka-Klett is a German software engineering company which has made several personal computer games of the sort called "edutainment". They are is point-and-click puzzle-adventure games for either the PC or the Mac...

 and the scientific publisher Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, agreed to produce a commercial version of the software. The school version of Cinderella 1.0 was published in 1998, including about 150 examples, animations and exercises created with Cinderella, the university version was released in 1999.

In 2006, a new version of Cinderella, Cinderella.2, was published in an online-only version. The release of Cinderella 3.0 is scheduled for 2010. This version will have a printed manual published by Springer-Verlag.

Features

Interactive geometry and analysis takes place in the realm of euclidean geometry
Euclidean geometry
Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to the Alexandrian Greek mathematician Euclid, which he described in his textbook on geometry: the Elements. Euclid's method consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms, and deducing many other propositions from these...

, spherical geometry
Spherical geometry
Spherical geometry is the geometry of the two-dimensional surface of a sphere. It is an example of a geometry which is not Euclidean. Two practical applications of the principles of spherical geometry are to navigation and astronomy....

 or hyperbolic geometry
Hyperbolic geometry
In mathematics, hyperbolic geometry is a non-Euclidean geometry, meaning that the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry is replaced...

. It includes a physics simulation engine (with real gravity on Apple computers) and a scripting language. An export to blog feature allows for a 1-click publication on the web of a figure. It is currently mainly used in Universities in Germany but its ease of use makes it suitable for usage at primary and secondary level as well.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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