Add Help to complex numbers and other calculator keyboards

[rdstern]

@N-thony this should be easy to allocate - and perhaps fun, for someone who is interested in maths. It is not urgent, but it fits well with using R-Instat to support maths courses for the sort of maths needed generally and also useful in statistics. Perhaps @anastasia-mbithe will be interested to discuss with the education team? Maybe @derekagorhom could do it, or @anastasia-mbithe herself, if it is quick and she is interested, or even someone new, and supervised by Ana?

They could play first to understand what this is all about. R includes complex numbers as described here.

Whoever is doing it should first have an understanding. They can do everything now, of course, by just typing the functions (and using the +, - *, / and ^ keys). Here is an example:

a) File > New Data Frame, values 1 to 100 as usual. b) In the calculator type something like complex(real = stats::rpois(100,1), imaginary = stats::rpois(100,4)) c) Then add some simple calculations, e.g. x1 * x2, x2 ^ 3, etc to show those work.
d) Then show the square root now works for negative numbers, e.g. sqrt(as.complex(-x1)) e) Then log and exp, etc. f) And the circular functions (sin, cos, etc) from the maths keyboard also work.

The screen-shot also shows a (hopefully small task for @N-thony, namely that the significant figures don't work, so the results look messy. (The scientific does.) And the signif function from the maths keyboard works fine, so this should probably be a very small change. Perhaps that could be done quickly on a separate pull request?

So to the keyboard.
complex, real, imaginary, mod, arg conjugate, sqrt, exp, log, round Then Help of course!

The last 4 are just taken for the maths keyboard. The others are for as.complex, Re, Im, Mod, Arg, Conj as described in the documentation. Hopefully the special Help key could go straight to the Complex page.

There is a bigger picture I am then considering here. The mosaic project seems still to be going. It includes a book about the use of R to support the teaching of calculus. I wonder about the role of R-Instat and their mosaic project.

I am not sure if that book is our best entry point - and it doesn't mention complex numbers much. But it is consistent with the use of R to support maths teaching. I will be happy discussing statistical aspects of mosaic and I wonder if there will be interest in innodems in the maths side?

[rdstern]

@derekagorhom I add a reference document here

[N-thony]

@rdstern I tried to reproduce the above observation and found the Significat figures do work fine. Perhaps we can have a quick call and try to reproduce this together or you can try again to confirm?