Cinderella is a proprietary interactive geometry software, written in

Java programming language Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers ''write once, run an ...

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 is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its N ...

on the

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

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 Karlsruhe ( , , ; South Franconian German, South Franconian: ''Kallsruh'') is the List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, third-largest city of the German States of Germany, state (''Land'') of Baden-Württemberg after its capital o ...

, Germany. Due to this attention the German educational software publisher Heureka-Klett and the scientific publisher

Springer-Verlag Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Originally founded in 1842 ...

Heidelberg Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...

, 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 printed manual for the now current version 2.6 has been published by Springer-Verlag in 2012. In 2013, the pro version of Cinderella has been made freely available.

Features

Interactive geometry and analysis takes place in the realm of

euclidean geometry Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, which he described in his textbook on geometry: the ''Elements''. Euclid's approach consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms ...

spherical geometry 300px, A sphere with a spherical triangle on it. Spherical geometry is the geometry of the two-dimensional surface of a sphere. In this context the word "sphere" refers only to the 2-dimensional surface and other terms like "ball" or "solid sp ...

hyperbolic geometry In mathematics, hyperbolic geometry (also called Lobachevskian geometry or Bolyai–Lobachevskian geometry) is a non-Euclidean geometry. The parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry is replaced with: :For any given line ''R'' and point ''P' ...

. It includes a physics simulation engine (with real gravity on

Apple computers Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

) 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

Cinderella official websitePublic Beta versionOnline Documentation

CindyJS
a reimplementation in JavaScript {{science-software-stub Interactive geometry software