Xref: utzoo sci.math:8624 comp.sys.ibm.pc:38388
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!stat!fsu!prism!gitpyr!cheung
From: cheung@pyr.gatech.EDU (S. Y. Cheung)
Newsgroups: sci.math,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: math software
Keywords: maple, mathematica
Message-ID: <9607@pyr.gatech.EDU>
Date: 18 Nov 89 02:13:25 GMT
References: <18254@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: cheung@pyr.UUCP (S. Y. Cheung)
Distribution: na
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Lines: 23

In article <18254@watdragon.waterloo.edu> sasingh@dahlia.waterloo.edu (Sanjay Singh) writes:
>
>You may want to look into into Maple. I like it, but I might be a little
>biased since the Symbolic Computation Group in the CS department developed
>it here. If you are willing to skimp a bit on the graphics, you can get
>a very fast, powerful, and reliable package for a low price, for a large
>number of machines. To illustrate: Mathematica for Cray: $160000-$240000;
>Maple for Cray: $1500.

Two major systems on symbolic math are: MacSymma and Maple.
There is an article about MacSymma in IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and
Data Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1989. MacSymma is a huge symbolic
manipulation system. From what I have seen on the net, Maple and MacSymma
can crunch quite a variety of math problems. Also, my feeling is
that the people of Maple (U. of Waterloo) are still extending the system.

As for Mathematica, it does not compare with the two systems above.
But the frontend (especially on the Mac) is impressive (I am
impressed by the 3-D plots).
-- 
Shun Yan Cheung
Georgia Insitute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!gitpyr!cheung