Calculus software?

[Neuge]

For symbolic calculation freeware you can get Maxima.

[Borodog]

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For symbolic calculation freeware you can get Maxima.

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This looks really nice. Any major issues you know of?

[Neuge]

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For symbolic calculation freeware you can get Maxima.

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This looks really nice. Any major issues you know of?

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I've never used it much other than for integrating things I don't want to do by hand. It's from the same family tree that produced Maple and Mathematica, but it's the only one that's open source. It used to only be available in X, but since been ported to wx to make it non-cumbersome in Windows. I've never had any problems with my limited use of it though.

[moorobot]

Thank you for the welcome Borodog.

[diddyeinstein]

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TI-89

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This should do it.

[Senor Cardgage]

I see tons of people are suggesting Mathematica. I've never used it before; how does it compare to Maple?

I'm a math major (formerly in engineering) so I've had extensive experience with both Maple and MatLab, but I don't know the first thing about Mathematica.

[diddyeinstein]

Mathematica is better. I found Maple a bit more user friendly, but that's about it. You still can't divide by zero, but you can do about anything else in Mathematica.

The only problem is it's prohibitively expensive to get for a Calc course. Now if you needed to solve PDEs, ODEs & such everyday, then Mathematica is the way to go.

Plus it's creator is just a kooky guy, and I'm all for helping financially support him. Not like he needs it though.

[Siegmund]

I will second the Mathematica >> Matlab opinion. (I've used both. Admittedly I used Mathematica first.) My memory is that the fancy signal-processing things are available in both systems, while Mathematica is better at symbolic than Matlab-with-the-symbolic-package-added is. The only complaint I have with Mathematica is that it's exceptionally long-winded with function names and exceptionally unforgiving in its notation.

There are student versions of Mathematica, too - more than $100 but not into four figures like the full version is.

I'll be looking into Maxima, since I have been mathematica-deprived for the past year since taking a new job where it wasn't available.

[Siegmund]

...and, after a quick download and poke-around, maxima looks like great value, and should be able to do just about anything you'd need for a standard calculus sequence.

[DarkMagus]

Maple is very easy to use and user-friendly, especially the newer versions (i use Maple 10). I don't have a lot of experience with the others, although from what I remember from Mathematica it has a lot more command typing.