About This Website

I created Matrixer to make my life easier. My math class at university involves a lot of calculations on finite fields. Usual calculators however, only support calculations with real numbers and even Wolfram Alpha can't properly deal with finite fields. That is why I decided, that it was time to build my own calculator. This is what I came up with.

Matrixer is completely open source and you can view the code here.

Technologies Used on This Website:

• JavaScript:
  I coded the entire math engine powering this website in JavaScript. The calculator is completely front end, so there is no server back end but everything is calculated in the user's browser.
• Bootstrap:
  Bootstrap is a CSS framework which makes it a lot easier to create good-looking websites. It greatly reduced the amount of work I had to put into building the user interface of this website.
• jQuery:
  jQuery is a library which makes manipulating the graphical user interface a lot easier than it is in pure JavaScript. I use jQuery to obtain the user input (selected field and the expression string) from the GUI and to output the result on the GUI.
• KaTeX:
  KaTeX is a math typesetting library. It takes usual LaTeX code as an input and displays it as a mathematical expression on the screen. I use this library to display the results of the calculations. My own code generates LaTeX code as an output which is then given to KaTeX to display the result on screen.
• Webpack:
  Webpack is a NPM-based JavaScript module bundler. I mainly use it to convert the many JavaScript files used by my calculator to a single minified output file. This makes it easier to handle and reduces the loading time of the website.
• Babel:
  Babel is a tool that converts ECMAScript 6, which is a modern flavor of JavaScript, into ECMAScript 5, an older version of JavaScript. While version 6 has a lot of features that make coding easier and more intuitive, it is not supported by all browsers. To make the website compatible with older browsers too, I use Babel. That way I can write ECMAScript 6 code but actually deploy more compatible ECMAScript 5 code.
• Namecheap Logo Maker:
  To be honest, the Matrixer logo isn't very creative. However, this website just needed a logo and Namecheap's logo maker was the right tool for that job, because it took less that 5 minutes to create a halfway decent looking logo.
• RealFaviconGenerator:
  I generated this site's favicon (the little icon in the tab of your browser) using RealFaviconGenerator. This tool automatically scales your icon to the required image sizes and creates the HTML code necessary to include the favicon on the website.