Thread: CAS pros and cons

Hi, I'm thinking of getting a CAS for my laptop. Some cursory google research seems to indicate that the two big competitors out there are Maple and Mathlab. Is there a general consensus as to which is better?

Thanks

Depends on your reason for wanting a CAS. What projects are you looking to use it on?

Originally Posted by rainer

Hi, I'm thinking of getting a CAS for my laptop. Some cursory google research seems to indicate that the two big competitors out there are Maple and Mathlab. Is there a general consensus as to which is better?

Thanks

My first stop would be with the free alternatives: Maxima and XCAS.

MatLab is primarily a (exhorbitantly expensive) matrix computation environment with the symbolic features graphted on. The engine MuPad is pretty good on its own but if you use it stand alone you still have the penalty of Matlab running in the background.

For some idea of the range of CAS tools available see here

CB

Originally Posted by elbarto

Depends on your reason for wanting a CAS. What projects are you looking to use it on?

I went to the Maxima official site. They pretty much sum up my needs in this paragraph:

"Maxima is a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, and sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors. Maxima yields high precision numeric results by using exact fractions, arbitrary precision integers, and variable precision floating point numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions."

Can Maxima really do all this? I guess I'll download it and find out for myself.

You can have a try with WIRIS CAS

www.wiris.com/demo/en/

Originally Posted by reixarch

You can have a try with WIRIS CAS

www.wiris.com/demo/en/

It appears to be comercial.

CB

Hi,

as you say WIRIS tools are commercial (we do no hide it). They are a good option although.

The demo is available for free and it is fully functional.