In article <joe-0C1463.08423724072007@comcast.dca.giganews.com>, Joe Strout <joe@strout.net> wrote:
> As a student, I used Mathematica for years and loved it. But now, I no > longer qualify for an educational discount, but still have occasional > need (or desire) to do some math -- but the standard price ($2500) is > ridiculous, absolutely out of the question for me. > > So, now I'm looking for an open-source equivalent. It seems like this > would be a good candidate for open-source development, but I can't seem > to find anything that's quite what I'm looking for. I'm aware of these: > > http://web.usna.navy.mil/~wdj/opensource_math.html > > ...but none of them sound as general and powerful as Mathematica. > Maxima sounds close, though it's actually a predecessor of Mathematica; > I wonder how well it's stood up over time. > > Any opinions on these, or anything to consider not on the above list?
Octave is an open-source equivalent (more or less) to Matlab, although I'm told the plot functions aren't as good. There's also the R project, which is mainly used for statistical analysis, although you can do a great deal else with it. I've also got Gnuplot here, although I haven't really done much with it.
