Making New Math Simple

When I was a teen, I had dreams of becoming an engineer. My friend Ron Hollander and I would sit at our drafting tables for hours on end drawing intricate designs of everything from screws and bolts to massive buildings and flying cars. But, sadly, those dreams never became a reality, mostly because I'm mathematically challenged.

OK, the reality is I became a writer mostly because of the magic of a word processor. This magical tool gave me the ability to manipulate my prose faster and easier than I ever could with a typewriter.

I'm boring you with this history lesson on Larry's life because software tools often have the ability to change and simplify the way we do our jobs and conduct business. I've recently looked at two tools that, had they existed (or I had known about them) 25 years ago, I may not be writing this blog and, instead, be sitting at some CAD terminal designing a space elevator to replace the aging space shuttle.

PTC, one of the leading providers of CAD and product life-cycle management software, also makes Mathcad and Arbortext, two tools that frankly made my head spin and my mind drift back to my engineering dreams.

Mathcad, now in its 14th incarnation, is like a word processor for complex calculations. In natural expression (or as I like to say, stupid simple), the software will complete virtually any engineering or scientific calculation you put on to its page.

PTC says Mathcad's biggest competitor is Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet. What makes Mathcad different is its ease of use, error-preventing features and audit trail. Unlike Excel, the user doesn't have to know the complex coding and calculations required to work in the spreadsheet. As PTC says, you only need to know the language of mathematics -- the only lingua franca of the entire universe.

Mathcad also creates documentation and records for each step of the calculation, so anyone can trace back through the work done by an engineer to see how he arrived at his conclusions. Not a bad feature, especially when collaborating with peers around the world. Users can also import text and spreadsheet tables to explain their work.

Mathcad was born in a company that produces CAD/CAM software, but it's not restricted to design use. Anyone who does complex calculations -- pharmaceutical, physicists, astronomers -- can use the application. A really cool feature is its ability to manage measurements, preventing users from completing calculations with odd units, such as divided feet by centimeters. Think of it this way: In 1999 NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter because of a navigation error caused by engineers not converting English units to metric. MathCAD probably could have prevented that.

PTC's other cool tool is Arbortext, a Web-based system that uses XML scripting to automatically propagate changes across multiple documents. The magic of product life-cycle management is its ability to quickly manipulate engineering designs. It speeds the product development process, in part, by identifying parts that can be reused in new designs. What ArborText does is takes the documentation of different parts and ports them to the multiple product manuals.

So, if a car manufacturer decides to create multiple cars within the same design family, it can use several of the same parts -- doors, hoods, windshields, etc. -- in the build out of sedans, station wagons and coupes. If it changes a specification in a part design, ArborText will automatically update the documentation in all products. Again, ArborText was designed with CAD and PLM in mind, but it has the potential for use in virtually any project management situation.

Now, my dreams of becoming an engineer are long behind me, and I'm way too old to learn new tricks. Call me nostalgic, but these two products take me back to those days where I dreamed of inventing the flying car -- if only I could do the math.