# symbolic computation program/software

What are its strength and weakness? For example, efficiency, comprehensiveness, etc

Thanks!

-
please advise me how to make this post wiki – Tim Nov 21 '10 at 18:05
Just go to edit your post and check the box "community wiki" below it. – Timothy Wagner Nov 21 '10 at 18:12
Don't see this box. I am under firefox 3.0.19 with Ubuntu. – Tim Nov 21 '10 at 18:14
Try hard to look for it. Don't even have the "Answer" space. BTW is this question more suitable to ask on stackoverflow or here? – Tim Nov 21 '10 at 18:20
Probably because of my reputation not enough? – Tim Nov 21 '10 at 18:26

I recommend sageMath http://www.sagemath.org/, also Mathematica and Maple

An easy to use is Maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

You can to work with sage here: http://www.sagenb.org/ , not is necesary installing !!!

-

Both Mathematica and Maple are excellent.

It seems they have added symbolic computation toolbox for scilab (which is free). Since you are linux user, you might want to explore it. I have never personally used it though (I have used scilab itself and it does a good job of being a lilliputian Matlab)

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/scilab-scimax-doc

-
How about compared to matlab symbolic box, sympy in Python, Maxima? – Tim Nov 21 '10 at 18:07
Frankly, I haven't used the others. I especially recommend Maple, since it's really cheap for students and some universities (like mine) make a personal copy available for free. – Timothy Wagner Nov 21 '10 at 18:19
Thanks! That is the benefit of being a student. – Tim Nov 21 '10 at 18:22
If you go Linux you might look at the windows emulator wine. On there homepage you can check which windows software are compatible under wine (If I am not wrong it is possible to run Maple under wine...?) – AD. Nov 21 '10 at 18:43
@AD: Maple does have linux compatible versions. – Timothy Wagner Nov 21 '10 at 18:49

Another very popular free program for symbolic computations is PARI/GP. It is aimed somehow at computations in number theory, but its functionality is not only restricted to this. You can read a little bit about it also in the wikipedia article.

-

I suggest mathHandbook.com

mathHandbook - Online symbolic math software www.mathHandbook.com

It is an online symbolic math and computer algebra system. It can perform exact, numeric, symbolic and graphic computation, e.g. any order of derivative, fractional calculus, solve equation, and user-defined functions, linear regression, symbolic differentation and integration, pattern-match. It is a programming language, in which you can define conditional, case, piecewise, recursive, multi-value functions and procedures, derivatives, integrals and rules. It runs in any computer that supports Java. If you see it online, it can run offline in your computer. It is all of Java applet, Java application and Window application. Run MathHandbook.htm as Java applet, or run MathHandbook.bat as Java application.

-

I have been using Mathematica since fall 2007. I absolutely love it. It has good palettes included that help you typeset your equations more easily. It also has nice display options for giving presentations. However, if you are just wanting to typeset a paper, LaTeX is probably your best bet. TeXmaker is a very good free mac OS software for LaTeX.

Maple is another very popular computational software; however, I have not used it.

-

I think http://www.hicalc.com is good. This is a smple http://www.hicalc.com/program/24

Hicalc is online platform to calculate expression quickly or create program with a simple, intuitive interface and share them with other people. You can create program with almost all C# 4.0 syntax such as if, switch, while, for, foreach, etc., store and calculate your program anywhere at any time, share and Search Programs in public library.

With Hicalc, you can customize any converter and share with other people

-

DataMelt (http://jwork.org/dmelt/) is free program for symbolic computation.

-