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let me first add that I am a very visual person and as such I have a really hard time developing any kind of formula or constants that express my ideas, without a large amount of visual feedback.

That said, I am looking for a piece of software that could help me in research for engineering, and bridge the gap from idea to mathematical formula to then use in some other type of simulation or calculation software (MathLab for example), where one could lay out some generic rules (such as physics constraints and constants) to then try and develop your idea using your panel of fixed input values, constraints and constants.

I understand that you can use MatLab for this, and I have been using it, but as I said, I am a very visual person and prefer visual clutter and disorganization to an endless folder of matlab script files. Something like Blenders (Blender 3D program) Composite panel.

Hopefully someone within this math community can help me in this long quest of mine.

PS: I know about 25 programming languages, from Assembly,C to Java,C#,VB.NET, I have no problems with having to handle raw source code behind the scenes (for implementing constraints and such). Live input from hardware/software isn't essential.

PS2: Seeing how no one seems to fully understand what I want. I coded up an example and dropped it on dropbox. This demonstrates how the software would work, you have NODES connected by CONNECTIONS, each NODE may or may not receive inputs and may or may not give outputs, but must at least do one. Each node then works as a function, receiving an input, processing it and giving an output (could generate an output without any input, example of this would be the random 0 to 1 function). An input-only NODE example would be a Graph node, that just generates a graph for a set of inputs. Semi-working example here : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1242729/concept/creator.htm

Thank you.

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    What exactly is the question? What should the software do? In any case, you could try checking out [WolframAlpha](http://www.wolframalpha.com) which can do lots of nice (visual) stuff for you if you just plug in some mathematical junk. Also the choice of tags does not make any sense to me.2011-09-11
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    Quote from original post "I am looking for a piece of software". Question should be, "Does anyone know of a software like this?" (example: google Blender composite). Should also mention that I dont want to use it for first grade homework. But to actually find a mathematical representation of an idea with a series of complex constraints, think of it as the composite graph beeing the thought process behind finding FFT with a live preview (but of course for new things, you know real current research). Please let me know if I still didn't make myself clear and I will try to rephrase. Thank you.2011-09-11
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    You need to specify what you want to do with this software. "Visual software with constraints for mathematics" does not say what you want to do with it. Can you give an example of what you would use it for?2011-09-11
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    Going by the reference to Blender's Composite panel (examples: [1](http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/thumb/0/0a/Manual-Compositing-Node-Math_Quantize-Red.jpg/650px-Manual-Compositing-Node-Math_Quantize-Red.jpg), [2](http://mke3.net/projects/tests/disp_nodes.jpg)), I imagine Joao is looking for some kind of visual programming software where one can create nodes for primitive functions and connect them together through edges representing addition, multiplication, composition, etc., thus building up a complicated function by visually plugging things together.2011-09-11
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    @Rahul: are you thinking of something like [LabVIEW](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW)?2011-09-12
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    What Rahul Narian said is one step closer to what I want, thank you for actually taking a look at the reference. Imagine you can have function nodes that take Xi inputs and Xo outputs, what they actually do is "hidden" from view, only their inputs and outputs matter (node as function), some nodes could actually be constants you plug in to another node (or function if you want to call it that). Other nodes could be of type "display graph", so one could see what the data flowing thro it looks like. However from the replies, said software probably does not exist :/2011-09-12
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    Nodes would be like [link]http://raphaeljs.com/graffle.html[/link] with each line connecting an output of some other node to an input of the next one (Blenders Composite feature takes this much further, I recommend searching that instead).2011-09-12
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    Updated original question.2011-09-12

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So you're looking for a graphical programming language like Pure Data or Simulink?

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    This is more what I was looking for yes. But exactly what I want. I will confirm this as the right reply since it is the closest and probably the software I want does not exist yet. I will create it myself.2011-09-19