Mathcad Tips

PTC Mathcad Community Challenge is a bimonthly event where we pose a math problem for you to collaborate and solve using Mathcad Prime.

Mathcad Prime 11 world premiere sneak peek + roadmap REPLAY ON-DEMAND!

Mathcad Prime 10.0.1.0 is available for download.

August 20, 2024 Webcast

On April 9, 2024, 11:30 Eastern Time, PTC presented "The Latest in PTC Mathcad Prime 10". During the 28-minute webinar, PTC Mathcad product manager Andy McGough shows the new enhancements coming to Mathcad Prime 10, including Advanced Controls with scripting & choice of solving algorithms. There were also some brief bullet points at what's to come for future Mathcad Prime releases. Mathcad Prime 10 will be available for release and download later by April 23, 2024. Watch the webinar on-demand here!

It's a new, 2024 version of our "Happy Easter!" Easter Egg! What's different from the previous years' eggs is that this one is in Mathcad Prime 9, which allows us to use the "More Colors..." custom colour picker, for a far wider range of designs than before. The attached worksheet predominantly uses PTC's colour palette, which requires use of the custom colour picker... but there are some extra fun (non-PTC), previously unusable colours too, like pure green (0,255,0) and pink.   Happy Easter 2024!

Watch Mathcad for Mechanical Engineers!

Register for the Mathcad Virtual Conference 2023!

On June 27, 2023 (10:00 Eastern), PTC held a Mathcad for Civil Engineers webinar. Check out the now-recorded (formerly live) webinar for opportunities to: Learn what Mathcad is Learn Mathcad use cases for civil and structural engineers Watch Mathcad demos by a guest presenter (Dr. Pat Heffernan, professor of civil engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada) Listen to the Q&A with the presenters and the then-live audience It was a fun time! Here was an excerpt:

What's new in PTC Mathcad Prime 9 blog, interview, and webinar. Out now!

Professor Tetsuro Tokoro (ttokoro on the PTC Community) is a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan (IEEJ), and he has dedicated much of his time to teaching and studying electric circuit design for his college students at Japan’s National Institute of Technology (KOSEN), Gifu College.   A true man of math, ttokoro finds helping community members solve their problems to be very fun. He seeks out math-based brain teasers and shares them with the Mathcad community to gain the insights of his kind and very intelligent fellow Mathcad users. These include resistor meshes (including in 3D), perfect squared squares, and a puzzle where you must identify the minimum radius on a circle with n number of points where all distances between points must be an integer. Sometimes, he looks for problems on rosettacode.org to solve.   According to ttokoro, many of these problems are unique and won’t be found in a textbook (and many math textbooks in use were written before math software came to the scene) but demonstrate the value of math software. Ttokoro ventures to say that a lot of these problems cannot be solved by hand, or at least it would be unviable to do so, especially for students. Instead, Mathcad and its programming operators must be used to solve these problems.   Montage of resistor meshes and other fun problems ttokoro has introduced   Beginning in 2021, ttokoro has also become a prolific uploader of Japanese PTC Mathcad content on YouTube. Many of these videos share tips or are tie-ins to the puzzles he or others post on the PTC Community, including the Mathcad Community Challenges.   Ttokoro’s best resistor 3D mesh electric circuit. (Each edge is made by one ohm. Find the resistance between Node [0,0,0] and [1,1,2].)   Ttokoro first started using Mathcad with Mathcad 12, and his biggest requests for Mathcad Prime features are transparent colour availability and for the Animation tool to return. You’ll notice that in his brain teasers, as well as in his submissions to the Mathcad Community Challenges, ttokoro likes to show results with plots because it helps convey the meaning better than with math results alone and having more tools to show the results via images helps with that. This sort of thinking carries over to his academic work as well.   Ttokoro wearing his PTC Champion Jacket and PTC Mathcad T- shirt!   Thank you for your enthusiasm for math and contributions to the PTC Community, ttokoro!

Registration has opened for the Mathcad Virtual Conference 2022! Happening September 13, 2022, 10:00 Eastern time.   This will be our third annual Mathcad conference, and this year we're promising to talk only about information with demos that you will find valuable and interesting. You'll hear from... Brian Thompson, Mathcad general manager, introducing the show and discussing the current state of Mathcad Andrew McGough, Mathcad product manager, presenting an updated Mathcad Prime roadmap, along with world-premiere demos of some of the new functionality coming to next year's Mathcad Prime 9 Anji Seberino, Mathcad application engineer, showcasing Mathcad Prime's powerful design of experiments functionality Anna Novikova, Mathcad software engineer, deeply detailing the improvements made to Mathcad Prime 8's numeric and symbolic engines (including some enhancements that were not documented in Mathcad Help) A Mathcad customer and how Mathcad Prime powers his innovative structural engineering start-up Throughout the conference, you'll get to share your feedback to PTC about the sessions. We'll also be manning a text-based Q&A box. And if you are within the first 500 registrants, you will be able to have your chance to win a raffle to win one of 25 brand-new 100% cotton Mathcad T-shirts. PTC hasn't had new Mathcad merchandise in about a decade, but now we do, and these shirts are quite wonderful. The raffle numbers will be drawn using a Mathcad Prime program during the conference.   We hope to see you there! And if you aren't able to make it on the day of, we are recording the sessions and will send you the recordings afterward. We really hope that you'll find this to be the best Mathcad conference that we've ever hosted.       (view in My Videos)  

PTC has a Mathcad Scripted Control design Working Group for implementing scripted controls in Mathcad Prime 10.

This month’s challenge is related to electrical engineering. We have a simple circuit with an electrical potential of 220 Volts. Initially we have a single 10 Ohm resistor. Then we add a second resistor in parallel, with 10% higher resistance. Then we add a third resistor in parallel, with 10% higher resistance than the previous resistor. And so on. Calculate the current in the circuit for the single resistor case. Calculate the resistance of each additional resistor and current through each resistor for 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10 resistors in parallel. Can you write a function or program that calculates the resistance of each resistor and current through each resistor for n resistors in parallel? These calculations are fairly straightforward, so it will be interesting to see what tools – vectors, matrices, loops, plots, charts, etc. – that you use to solve the problem. As always, how you document your calculations is important as your worksheet will be visible to the community. Here is an example of three resistors in parallel, as drawn in Creo Schematics:   Find the Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines here!

This month's challenge is another geometry-based challenge - but it's non-Euclidean geometry. Given the following three points on a circle of radius 10 units, calculate the area of the spherical triangle: (5.339, 6.948, 4.819) (-4.018, -3.703, 8.375) (6.455, -6.679, -3.705) (Note that the point coordinates are rounded to three decimal places.)   Optional: Can you write a program or function that calculates the area for any three points on the surface? Is there a symbolic evaluation for three generic points (a,b,c), (d,e,f), and (g,h,k)?   Here is a 3D model in Creo 9 of the sphere and points:   Find the Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines here!   Edit: the coordinates of the second point were incorrect. Wildly incorrect. I have no idea how I wrote down the wrong numbers.

The first two challenges were biased towards mechanical engineering. May’s challenge pertains to geometry. Create a worksheet in which you calculate (1) the diameter of a circle and (2) the length of a side of a square that yields the minimum combined area for a combined perimeter of 1 meter. This is an optimization problem. What tools within Mathcad can provide you with a result? Optional: How can you depict the results? Can you use a 2D plot or Chart Component to visualize the answer? Find the Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines here!  

Solution: Mathcad Single User and Student Licenses can be transferred by using the link.  Select the version and enter the product code  Enter the new HOST ID onto which the license needs to be transferred - To correctly identify the Host ID on new machine, go to Windows Start > Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt > type ipconfig/all (ENTER) and with the Physical Address below the Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection there stands the Host ID -  Click on #Submit Request Below is the sample email triggered with new HOST ID license file (attachment)    Please save this license file to a secure location on your computer.  

PTC Mathcad Prime 8 has now released!   @CatMcchad a quick interview with PTC Mathcad's product manager, @amcgough, for this blog article about what's new and exciting in Mathcad Prime 8, what new functionality users and veterans will look forward to using, and how the Mathcad team decides what new functionality to put into each release. Much of that is customer-driven, and Andy cited several delivered requests from the Mathcad Ideas board on this very community. Read the interview here: https://www.mathcad.com/en/blogs/why-prime8-andy-mcgough     Andy will also be available next week (March 22 at 10:00 Eastern) for a webinar about what's new in Mathcad Prime 8, featuring demos of the new functionality, plus a live Q&A portion with Andy that yours truly will be moderating. Register for that here (or catch the replay-on-demand after the fact): https://www.mathcad.com/en/resources/webcast/whats-new-mathcad-8   Happy calculating~

Let’s face it, planetary gears are cool. They are used in all kinds of mechanisms, including transmissions, motors, and turbines. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to use Mathcad to build a worksheet that calculates the gear ratios and output speeds of a planetary gear under different configurations. The math behind the gear ratios is straightforward. But users should be able to select: The sun or planet carrier as the input; The planet carrier or ring as the output; and, The ring, sun, or planet carrier as the stationary component. How can the user select the desired component? How can you add intelligence to the worksheet to prevent an incorrect combination of input, output, and stationary? What inputs do you want for your calculator? You will have to make some choices. Your choices could include: Number of planets Number of teeth Component diameters Module / pitch Tools that you might consider include Combo boxes, programs, and functions involving strings. Here are some technical references to get you started: KHK Gears Instructables How Stuff Works Once again, this is a great project for students to work on in teams. Make the worksheet as simple or as complicated as you want. Others can build on your work, and you can build on others. Let’s see what the community can create! Good luck!   Find the Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines here!

  (Made in PTC Mathcad Prime 7)

Hi all! I'm pleased to announce that while Mathcad Prime 8 is releasing March 2022, we at PTC have just published a blog article letting you all know in advance what is being included! And PTC Community are the first ones to know. Check it out: https://www.mathcad.com/en/blogs/whats-mathcad-prime8   We'll post another announcement when Mathcad Prime 8 is actually released.   In the meantime, we've opened up registration for our accompanying What's New in Mathcad Prime 8 webinar coming March 22, 2022. I plan to moderate it, with Mathcad product manager Andrew McGough demoing the functionality in much more detail. The webinar will end with a live question and answer session.   Mathcad Prime 8 Webinar March 22   (Note that I'm not able to answer your Mathcad Prime 8 questions on this post, but Andy will certainly be able to in that webinar.)   Thanks!