Does Your Graphing Software Real-ly Work?
Rich Marchand, Timothy J. McDevitt, Michael J. Bossé, N. R. Nandakumar · PRIMUS · 2007
Many popular mathematical software products including Maple, Mathematica, Derive, Mathcad, Matlab, and some of the TI calculators produce incorrect graphs because they use complex arithmetic instead of real arithmetic. This article expounds on this issue, provides possible remedies for instructors to share with their students, and demonstrates that using complex arithmetic has some important advantages.