19 and makes theorems proven

Back again in Austria; I’ve been to two additional conferences during the last two weeks. The first one, in Serbia, was about computer aided mathematics education, and the second one was also, but with Czech colleagues from České Budějovice.

Sightseeing in Belgrade with Ivan, Gábor and Simon

In Serbia I took part at many nice talks. Maybe the best one, Alfred Wassermann’s new project Sketchometry was a real joy to see. The beta version already recognizes several gestures from the user, both by mouse on a PC or fingers on a tablet. By clicking the + sign on the bottom right, one can start to try this free product on ones own very quickly. Alfred confessed that the first minute was usually a bad experience for some users, but after then the usage became really intuitive and joyful. Anyway, this is really cool, as Gábor (the lead web developer at GeoGebra) mentioned after the introductory talk.

Sketchometry uses JSXGraph as its underlying DGS, and also Darko Drakulic, a contributor of GeoGebra in developing a numerical method for locus line visualization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2011, wrote a nice frontend for it, and gave a talk about his development at the conference. JSXGraph, Wassermann’s main project in the recent years, seems to be a reliable backend for such lightweight GUIs. This is an important issue for smartphones, and at GeoGebra we also plan to reduce the application size as much as possible.

So, I’m back in Austria now, but the life did not stop here, either. Our fresh GSoC 2012 student, Damien Desfontaines did very good improvements on the area method for the OpenGeoProver subsystem. Now his brand new prover is capable of proving 18 theorems or statements from the 44 test cases. This result is remarkable enough if we consider his age (Damien is 19 years old!), the time he spent with the implementation (not more than 3 weeks), and that his work gives far the fastest computation for Desargues’s theorem (142 milliseconds).