USE OF MAXIMA AND XMAXIMA IN PATRAS, GREECE

Dear Colleagues,

My name is Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis and I work at the School of
Engineering of the University of Patras, Greece. My e-mail
address is

ioakimidis@otenet.gr

My postal work address is

Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis
Department of Engineering Sciences
School of Engineering
University of Patras
GR-265.04  Rion, Patras
G R E E C E

Very recently, I have "discovered" Maxima and I plan to officially
use it in my courses (simultaneously with Mathematica) during
the present Academic year to begin soon. The advantages of
Maxima are (i) its well-known power, (ii) the availability of the
source code and (iii) its public license (GNU Public License).

With this message I am pleased to introduce myself as a very
recent user of Maxima (unfortunately not a very systematic one)
under the MS-Windows (Millennium edition as well as NT) by
using the XMaxima GUI. In the future, I would wish to use the
TeXmacs interface to Maxima, but for the moment this is not
available for MS-Windows (as far as I know) neither will it be
in the near future.

I am already grateful to Professor Richard Fateman for his
kind comments and support in my using and distributing
Maxima in Greece. I intend to distribute Maxima through
the Internet and CD-ROM as well (respecting GPL of course).

I am also grateful to your development team of Maxima, who
permitted the use of this so powerful computer algebra
system and I am sure the use of Maxima will become much
more wide in the future especially now that new releases will
take place and release 5.9 is already almost available.

Please, accept my sincere congratulations for your so
valuable efforts!

Being a mechanical-electrical engineer with interests in
engineering mechanics I am completely unable to significantly
contribute to your efforts (I am not using C, Lisp, Linux, Cygwin,
Migwin, etc.), but I plan to bring to your attention my comments,
questions and suggestions on Maxima as soon as I will find
available the related time in the future with the hope that these
might be considered by you on the further develoment of Maxima.

For the moment, my suggestion is that if this might be possible,
it would be very nice and useful with respect to the use of Maxima
that a Windows executable release for version 5.6 or even 5.9 can
take officially place. I do not like to be continuously obliged to use
only release 5.5 beta.

It is my impression that a novice in Maxima and amateur in computer
algebra in general (like me) is unable to compile the GNU Common
Lisp, Maxima and XMaxima from the provided sources especially
under Windows. The Maxima Book seems also not offering such
help. Therefore, a Windows executable release seems to be of
great interest, the popularity of Windows (especially in countries
like Greece) taken into account.

Of course I know that you are working hard for such a release
especially during the last few months mainly thanks to the original
successful efforts by Mike Tomas last March, but I expect to find a
Windows executable release (beyond 5.5 beta) really available
for direct downloading in the near future (even with bugs of course!).

I will send you some comments with respect to the improvements
of XMaxima I would like to see available (if possible) as soon as I
will find the necessary time, perhaps tomorrow.

It is a real pleasure and honor for me (and my students too very
soon) to be able to use the famous M.I.T.'s and Professor Schelter's
Maxima in Patras, Greece thanks to you, your interest and
devotion to the project and, naturally, so much and hard work!

Many, many thanks and congratulations again!

Kindest regards from Patras,

Nikos