Math Softwares, your preference?

Based upon the following math softwares, which one would you consider the "best"?


  • Total voters
    6
  • Poll closed .

Thread Starter

ELECTRONERD

Joined May 26, 2009
1,147
Hey Everyone,

I need a math software and I'm wondering what's the best one you could possibly suggest? "Best" to me includes facets such as the most technical, good graphical representations of problems, and capable of virtually all types of math problems.

  • Maxima
  • Scilab
  • Octave
  • Freemat
  • R
I'd like to have your own opinion on each of them, or the one you use, and why.
 

Dave

Joined Nov 17, 2003
6,969
I take it one of the criteria is that it is free, hence the obvious omission of Matlab?

Either way, I've had a good experience with both Octave and Freemat (used as a Matlab alternative), but Freemat is that little bit more polished IMO...so Freemat.

Dave
 

Thav

Joined Oct 13, 2009
82
I voted Maxima here, because I use that for any laplace or complex algebraic work.

I use Scilab when I'm doing linear algebra or dealing with data sets.
 

Papabravo

Joined Feb 24, 2006
21,157
It is really hard to beat `R' for any kind of statistical work or data reduction. The built in functions for the normal and students-t distribution are invaluable.

I also like Scilab for its programming and plotting capabilities
 

Thread Starter

ELECTRONERD

Joined May 26, 2009
1,147
Thanks for all the replies everyone!

Well, I'm currently in Algebra I for math as a student, what would you guys recommend for someone like that? I don't only do Algebra though, I experiment with antennas so plotting and graphs is always nice. I'm also hoping to learn some new math from one of these softwares.
 
Last edited:

someonesdad

Joined Jul 7, 2009
1,583
I'm in the process of writing a short white paper on why I think engineers and scientists ought to take a look at python and some of its add-on libraries. python is a great glue language and a powerful general-purpose programming tool in its own right -- with a huge standard library. There are thousands of solutions on the web, meaning there's a pretty good chance someone has already worked on the problem you're interested in.

My favorite python add-on is numpy, an array processing tool. Lots of good capabilities and it's fast (core code is in C). matplotlib is good for presentation-quality plots and sympy can be used to do symbolic calculations (sympy can also do 3D plots with OpenGL rendering so that you can move the plot around and rotate it to see it from all sides). One of my examples does an indefinite integral with sympy, then dynamically compiles the resulting formula into python (along with a series approximation) and executes them with a numpy array and plots the result. All in around 20 lines of code. I'll post the white paper here when I get it finished.
 
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