On 11/10/05, dasimov@earthlink.net <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
I hope to buy one of {maple, mathematica, mathlab} to run on a Macintosh I'm planning to buy in the near future.
I'd like to hear preferences and reasons from any of you who have used more than one of these.
(I've never used matlab, but find that mathematica's incessant need for typing capital letters to begin each built-in command, together with its uniformly mediocre help files -- at least compared with maple's -- cause me to lean toward maple over mathematica.
But I'd love to hear others' opinions. I'm curious about breadth of features, ease of use, and quality of graphics. (Price is relevant, too.)
--Dan
Gene>Another possibility is Macsyma. See symbolics.com, where they offer Macsyma for $500. RWG once worked for Macsyma, and he likely has
useful hints.
To my knowledge, Mac Macsyma was never released. The Windows version remains my favorite CAS, especially since I have several years' worth of personal enhancements. However, *all* the systems have bugs and weaknesses. You can't have too many CASes. There is also an effort (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/) to update the public domain version Maxima, i.e., to recapitulate the mountain of debugging and enfeaturement scaled by Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc. I sincerely wish them luck--Macsyma is an endangered cultural treasure. MK> Thanks to MIT, I have access to both. It is absurd that you can't thank MIT, its birthplace, for access to Macsyma as well.
I have a moral inclination against Mathematica, so when I start a new project, I try to do it in Maple instead. So far, the result has been the same each time: I persevere until I hit a bug in the Maple kernel, at which point I throw up my hands, file a bug report, and switch to Mathematica.
So, much to my chagrin, I think Mathematica is the only reasonable advice I can offer.
--Michael
Paul>Mathematica is nice. I use it on the Mac. It's not cheap, though. I sometimes wish they had some version in between the student version and the
professional version---a sort of hobbyist version.
Have you looked at Derive? It's a sincere, non-marketing-driven system stressing clarity and correctness, with a consequently loyal fan base. The new owner, TI, is none too accommodating, but a damsite more than Macsyma's. Screenshot: http://gosper.org/derivescreen.GIF --rwg PS: George Andrews solved my q-Pochhmamer question:
The first expression for P(m,n,k) can directly be rewritten as
(q;q)_m (q,q)_n / ((q,q)_(m-k) (q,q)_(n-k) (q,q)_k) .
Now use the standard reduction that
Wow, how often do we see a world class hypergeometer who also does tax preparation?-)
(q,q)_N / (q,q)_(N-k) = (q^(-N),q,k) q^(Nk - k(k-1)/2) , ^ Presumably ... (q^(-N),q)_k ...
and the second representation follows.