[math-fun] ??? maple, mathematica, matlab ???
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
On Thursday 10 November 2005 23:36, 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.
Matlab is a completely different animal from the other two; it emphasizes numerical over symbolic computations. It seems unlikely to me that it would meet your needs well if Maple or Mathematica do, and vice versa. I don't have enough, or recent enough, experience with Maple or Mathematica to have a useful opinion on that particular holy war. -- g
And unless you're going to use the very advanced features of Matlab, there's a free clone (right down to the function names) called Octave. On 11/10/05, Gareth McCaughan <gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com> wrote:
On Thursday 10 November 2005 23:36, 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.
Matlab is a completely different animal from the other two; it emphasizes numerical over symbolic computations. It seems unlikely to me that it would meet your needs well if Maple or Mathematica do, and vice versa.
I don't have enough, or recent enough, experience with Maple or Mathematica to have a useful opinion on that particular holy war.
-- g
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-- Mike Stay metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike
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. Paul On 11/10/05 6:59 PM, "Mike Stay" <mike@math.ucr.edu> wrote:
And unless you're going to use the very advanced features of Matlab, there's a free clone (right down to the function names) called Octave.
On 11/10/05, Gareth McCaughan <gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com> wrote:
On Thursday 10 November 2005 23:36, 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.
Matlab is a completely different animal from the other two; it emphasizes numerical over symbolic computations. It seems unlikely to me that it would meet your needs well if Maple or Mathematica do, and vice versa.
I don't have enough, or recent enough, experience with Maple or Mathematica to have a useful opinion on that particular holy war.
-- g
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-- Mike Stay metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike
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--- Gareth McCaughan <gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com> wrote:
On Thursday 10 November 2005 23:36, 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 work for Wolfram Research, so I might be biased. I've also been a Maple user since Version 5. I have version 10, now. I'd still give the edge to Mathematica. Doing things in Maple is more work ... most of the time, I can just get whatever I need straight from MathWorld, Functions, or straight from the Mathematica Guidebooks. If you'll purely be looking at integer sequences, with no graphics, and no special functions, consider Pari. Ed Pegg Jr
At the Gathering for Gardner last year, I suggested to Bill Ritchie that he manufacture Frans de Vreugd's Extreme Torture puzzle. It was an extreme mathematical anomaly. I wrote a column about it: http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/mathgames_08_02_04.html My thinking was it's fun to take a puzzle apart, and this is a puzzle where taht fun part will last a *long* time. Well .. Thinkfun has released the world's hardest puzzle, under the name Gordian's Knot. And it looks so cute: http://www.puzzlemethis.com/cgi-bin/puzzle/THK06820.html Ed Pegg Jr
I'm extremely unhappy with the last few versions of Maple. They are adding piles of useless features, and not bothering to test the basics. Apparently at random, it will turn on the hour-glass icon when it is not doing a computation, and the stop button is greyed out. Maple just locks up for several minutes. It has become useless to me. I currently have version 9.5, which I bought as a student edition for $150 total. At that price, I can't complain, but I would not pay the full price, which I think is around $2000. You can buy the student edition online, but you have to assert that you are a student. Another possibility is Macsyma. See symbolics.com, where they offer Macsyma for $500. RWG once worked for Macsyma, and he likely has useful hints. Gene --- <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 _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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Thanks to MIT, I have access to both. 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 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 _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
-- It is very dark and after 2000. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a bleen.
Just for my curiosity, what is your moral objection to Mma? I have a similar feeling but I use it for my experimental math research anyway. It's not pleasant but it does the job. Steve Gray ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Kleber" <michael.kleber@gmail.com> To: <dasimov@earthlink.net>; "math-fun" <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 7:23 PM Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] Re: [math-fun] ??? maple, mathematica, matlab ??? Thanks to MIT, I have access to both. 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
Not stuff appropriate to discuss on this mailing list, I think. (Else it'd have been coy of me not to say what I meant the first time...) --Michael On 11/10/05, Steve Gray <stevebg@adelphia.net> wrote:
Just for my curiosity, what is your moral objection to Mma? I have a similar feeling but I use it for my experimental math research anyway. It's not pleasant but it does the job.
Steve Gray
----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Kleber" <michael.kleber@gmail.com> To: <dasimov@earthlink.net>; "math-fun" <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 7:23 PM Subject: [Norton AntiSpam] Re: [math-fun] ??? maple, mathematica, matlab ???
Thanks to MIT, I have access to both. 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
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
-- It is very dark and after 2000. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a bleen.
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.
----- Original Message ----- From: "R. William Gosper" <rwg@osots.com> ....
. 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.
The sourceforge project has some features that were never added to the commercial Macsyma, and even some bug fixes. Though the loss of the Macsyma Inc / Symbolics legacy is unfortunate. Downloading it and setting it up is trivial. (Click on the install icon).
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.
I thought all versions were identical. Just the prices differ. There are other systems like Jacal, MuPAD (formerly free, but maybe no longer), Pari, ...
On Dim, nov 13, 2005 at 09:12:56 -0800, Richard Fateman wrote:
The sourceforge project has some features that were never added to the commercial Macsyma, and even some bug fixes. Though the loss of the Macsyma Inc / Symbolics legacy is unfortunate. Downloading it and setting it up is trivial. (Click on the install icon).
I never used Macsyma, thus I can't make any comparison, but I used much MuPAD 2.5.3 and GNU Maxima; though the library of MuPAD probably is bigger, I preferred Maxima as soon as I discovered it.
[...] There are other systems like Jacal, MuPAD (formerly free, but maybe no longer), Pari, ...
To my knowledge, something indeed has changed int Mupad's license between releases 2.5.3 and 3, but I never knew what. I first thought it was not free any longer, but I installed the new version on the computer of my wife and got some kind of strange license that didn't cose anything to me, though obviously it was something different and more complicated to get than previously (until 2.5.3 when running MuPAD, my name would be written on the screen at the beginning; in some 3.1.? version there was rather an ugly number instead of my name), but in fact I didn't have the time to use it since... I discovered GNU Maxima which suits my needs perfectly (besides I had to use Linux emulation in order to make MuPAD run and I can use GNU Maxima natively on a FreeBSD system). I also use Pari/GP for more "computational" things: - Maxima is the best free CAS I know; - Pari/GP seems to be the best (free or not free) for numerical manipulations; note it is not really a CAS and can't be compared to Maple, Mathematica, Macsyma, Maxima, MuPAD, etc. though it has some efficient support for rational functions; but it is a much better tool for eating numbers rather than RAM... when I have to make a computation last several hours, I wouldn't even think to use something like Maxima (though I did it once): I would either code in into C with GMP or more often use Pari/GP. Note that it has many line features: - support for readline (of course I have something equivalent with all my other tools since I use a line editor, 'ledit', but it is a very important feature anyway); - probably one of the most efficient support for finding linear dependancies or minimal polynomial for a numeric number (even for finding linear dependancies between vectors); - a full integration to C programming whenever speed is an issue; - very efficient numerical routines for general purposes factoring (well I don't mean breaking a RSA code, but when you need to factor some 20 or 30 digits number for studying what it is made with, Pari is much quicker than Maxima - I don't remember with MuPAD, but I think MuPAD was very slow); - In fact I think Pari is intended to handle with seevral thousands digits numbers which is a very good choice (the manual explains that it is not intended to handle with several millions digits, but indeed most computations have to be optimized for hundreds or thousands of digits rather than millions (where using a library and coding at a low level is an issue), this makes Pari/GP very efficient; - ... I could add many things here, since for precise purposes, I really think Pari/GP is much more easy and efficient, but precisely now I think to something I used yesterday: most systems have a "system()" function (and GNU Maxima has it); what made my life very happy yesterday was to discover the "external()" function which takes the output as a literal value (something like `...` in a shell): a = external(concat("myscript ",Str(value))); where myscript is whatever you want (in my case it was a C program writing anything more or less valid according to Pari; in my case the C program makes a request to a database on a network and merely writes a vector in the standard output: [ 1214265167, 1212176271 ,12126188, 90398938, ...] Of course I could have done with any other tool with some heavy input/output feature, but this is the real Unix way to do it with this kind of "shell escape" and again I was happy to do it like that. Regards, -- Thomas Baruchel Home Page: http://baruchel.free.fr/~thomas/
participants (11)
-
dasimov＠earthlink.net -
ed pegg -
Eugene Salamin -
Gareth McCaughan -
Michael Kleber -
Mike Stay -
Paul Reiners -
R. William Gosper -
Richard Fateman -
Steve Gray -
Thomas Baruchel