----- Original Message ---- From: Bernie Cosell <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 6:41:37 AM Subject: [math-fun] Matlab We don't have any real need for it, but for a while now my wife and I have been kicking around the idea of getting a copy of Mathematica, mostly just for fun. I was poking around and discovered that "Matlab & Simulink" is *less*expensive* than Mathematica [$130 for the latter, $100 for the former]. Is Matlab "a good thing"? Will it do the sort of symbolic-computing and graphing that Mathematica will? /Bernie\ Maple has a student edition. It's $129 for Windows + Linux + Mac OS X. You will be asked for your educational institution and student ID number. I'm very pleased with Maple. A coworker who was a long time Mathematica user tried out Maple, and much preferred Maple. http://www.maplesoft.com/ But my real favorite is Macsyma, and I will go back to using it at work when it's resurrected. Ask RWG about how you might acquire a Macsyma. Gene ____________________________________________________________________________________ Shape Yahoo! in your own image. Join our Network Research Panel today! http://surveylink.yahoo.com/gmrs/yahoo_panel_invite.asp?a=7
On 8/21/07, Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com> wrote:
Maple has a student edition. It's $129 for Windows + Linux + Mac OS X. You will be asked for your educational institution and student ID number. I'm very pleased with Maple. A coworker who was a long time Mathematica user tried out Maple, and much preferred Maple. http://www.maplesoft.com/
My dislike of Maple is that new versions often render old programs broken -- they change the language in annoying ways with each new release. You can use PARI/GP for free ... http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/ ... and it might serve your needs. There's also SAGE, but I haven't tried it enough to recommend it myself: http://www.sagemath.org/ --Joshua Zucker
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
Since I, probably, one of the most experienced Maple users on this list, and I haven't used Matlab, Mathematica and SAGE for a long enough time, I may be biased. Anyway, my opinion is that Maple is user friendly and easy to learn, but it is very slow comparing with others and has a lot of problems related to both programming bugs and mathematical inconsistencies. Mathematica is much faster, produces better quality graphics and has much less bugs. However, it uses an akward language, also has some mathematical inconsistencies and its licensing policy is very bad. For example, when I tried to install it in Linux running in the Microsoft VirtualPC (in Windows) on the same computer and the same Windows where I had it installed, I was told that I can do that only if I sign a form that I delete Mathematica installed in Windows. The most ridiculous thing in this story was that my Windows Mathematica version was sent to me complimentary from Wolfram Research. Matlab is a very good product for numerical computations and its graphics beats even Mathematica, not talking about Maple. However, it has a lot of free clones, such as Octave, scilab, and NumPy with SciPy etc., and it is not clear why a person (I am not talking about firms or companies - they might have their reasons) would buy it for fun when the same fun can be obtained for free. SAGE is free, fast, mathematically consistent, and includes a lot of mathematical capabilities unavailable in anything else (in particular, it includes PARI, Maxima, GAP, Singular, and NumPy with SciPy). Also, it is under active development. I have a lot of fun with it as well as with Python - the programming language on which SAGE is based. A negative side of it is that it doesn't run on Windows (except VirtualPC, vmware, or other virtualization.) - that may be changed in the future though. Alec
participants (4)
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Alec Mihailovs -
Ed Pegg Jr -
Eugene Salamin -
Joshua Zucker