I'll weigh in. I'm an employee of Wolfram Research, so I might be biased. Four major free bonuses for Mathematica are MathWorld, Demonstrations, Functions, and the Infocenter. They provide code for thousands of math topics. The Demonstrations project includes a free Mathematica player. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ http://functions.wolfram.com/ http://library.wolfram.com/ Comparing a years-old version of Mathematica to a brand new version of Maple isn't really fair. Or vice-versa. I haven't tried Matlab, myself, but I have been keeping up with Maple updates for the last 15 years. I like Mathematica 6 more than Maple 11 (but I might be biased). Geometry Expressions is better than the other geometry programs listed in my column on vector software, but is also more expensive. http://www.geometryexpressions.com/index.php http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/mathgames_08_01_05.html --Ed Pegg Jr