Winplot is a general-purpose plotting utility for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

that can draw (and animate)

curve In mathematics, a curve (also called a curved line in older texts) is an object similar to a line, but that does not have to be straight. Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point. This is the definition that ...

s and

surface A surface, as the term is most generally used, is the outermost or uppermost layer of a physical object or space. It is the portion or region of the object that can first be perceived by an observer using the senses of sight and touch, and is ...

s presented in a variety of formats. The final 2012 release of Winplot can run on Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, 7. It may also run on Windows 8, 10, and 11. It is a

32-bit application In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

. It is released as

freeware Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...

, with no

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

available, as its author, Rick Parris, did not want to relinquish control of development, and felt his code was lengthy and badly documented. Rick Parris died on October 23, 2012. He was 67. Some time after his death,

Phillips Exeter Academy Phillips Exeter Academy (often called Exeter or PEA) is an Independent school, independent, co-educational, college-preparatory school in Exeter, New Hampshire. Established in 1781, it is America's sixth-oldest boarding school and educates an es ...

stopped hosting his official Winplot website, so an alternative link is provided.

Features

Winplot can generate both 2D and 3D plots of functions and

sequences In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is call ...

. It can also animate these plots using up to 23 variables and their corresponding sliders. Only one slider may be animated at a time. It also has various export options including

EPS An extended play (EP) is a Sound recording and reproduction, musical recording that contains more tracks than a Single (music), single but fewer than an album. Contemporary EPs generally contain up to eight tracks and have a playing time of 1 ...

, SVG, PiCTeX, Metafile, and simple copying to the Windows

clipboard A clipboard is a thin, rigid writing board with a clip at the top for holding paper in place. A clipboard is typically used to support paper with one hand while writing on it with the other, especially when other writing surfaces are not avail ...

. Unlike most other free plotting software, Winplot can plot implicit functions, slope fields, and intrinsic curves, and perform several standard calculus operations on the functions, such as generating graphs of cross-sectional solids and

solids of revolution In geometry, a solid of revolution is a solid figure obtained by rotating a plane figure around some straight line (the '' axis of revolution''), which may not intersect the generatrix (except at its boundary). The surface created by this re ...

, tracing trajectories on slope fields given an initial point, and calculating line and surface integrals.

References

External links

* Plotting software Discontinued software {{Science-software-stub