Use of Maxima and XMaxima in Patras, Greece

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Drewes" <drewes at interstice>
To: "maxima mailing list" <maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu>
Cc: "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis" <ioakimidis@otenet.gr>; "synthespian"
<synthespian@debian-rs.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2002 9:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Maxima] USE OF MAXIMA AND XMAXIMA IN PATRAS, GREECE


> On 7 Sep 2002, synthespian wrote:
>
> > With regards to Maxima, I find that one of the most important things
> > lacking in Maxima is simple documentation on how to use formulas and
> > such, from the user's perspective.
>
> I agree.  I found all the "primer" style documentation too trivial, and a
> systematic study of the reference documenation would be very time
> consuming and not necessarily immediately helpful.
>
> I am considering writing a short document that would describe getting the
> most out of Maxima from a user's perspective, with a particular eye to
> highlighting the differences in how one uses Maxima vs. Maple and
> Mathematica.  The goal would be to help people who want to convert from
> one of the closed systems to Maxima.
>
> I am a sophisticated computer user but at the same time an unsophisticated
> computer algebra user, and though I am also a strong open source advocate
> it was an iffy proposition at the beginning of my recent math course as to
> whether I could safely commit to using Maxima instead of Maple.  So far,
> so good, with the gracious support of this mailing list.  But a document
> like the one I hope to write would have made the decision easier.
>
> The heart of the document would be taking a nontrivial multistep problem
> and showing how it would be done in Maple and then again in Maxima,
> showing the difference in "workspace" approaches between the two systesms
> that was the main obstacle I encountered when trying to use Maxima for the
> first time after a little bit of Maple experience.
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
>
> Rich
>

That's an extremely useful idea for the Maxima users and for the wide use
of Maxima even instead of Maple or Mathematica. Mathematica should
also be included if possible in all of the comparisons of the approaches.

For the moment I will be obliged to also use for my course the existing
commercial Macsyma documentation, including the User's Guide (available
to me), at least two short books for mathematics courses and one
recent (??) calculus book using Macsyma having been published by
Springer-Verlag, Wien this June. I have none of the latter three books
available so far and, moreover, none of them concerns Maxima (there are
some differences with commercial Macsyma especially with its last releases)
and compares Maxima with Maple and Mathematica.

Of course, the definitive sources of information are the Maxima Manuals,
but sometimes they are not so easy for the introduction of a new user to
Maxima. A much more friendly book is required.

Therefore, this short book you plan to prepare is exactly what the new
user requires to proceed with Maxima. I might also consider to prepare
some introductory material for Maxima (in order to help my students
here in Patras) but, evidently, in Greek!

Naturally, any impression that Maxima cannot proceed to difficult
computations (compared to Maple and Mathematica) should disappear
(at least for any educational task). On the contrary, there are areas where
Maxima has algorithms not available in Maple or Mathematica (e.g. this
is the case with integral equations).

Many thanks for the comments and best regards from Patras,

Nikos