Use of Maxima and XMaxima in Patras, Greece

----- Original Message -----
From: "synthespian" <synthespian at debian-rs>
To: "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis" <ioakimidis@otenet.gr>
Cc: "maxima mailing list" <maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2002 8:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Maxima] USE OF MAXIMA AND XMAXIMA IN PATRAS, GREECE

Reply by Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis

Dear Henry,

My brief comments follow yours:


> Dear Professor --
>
> I being just a Calculus student myself, run the risk of being utterly
> arrogant by giving you "advice."

Surely you can although, probably, I have more experience than you in
engineering mechanics and you have much more experience than me in
computer algebra and computers in general.

> But I was very empathic towards your story, as I study in Brazil. I
> would imagine that a department in Greece does not have the money for a
> full university license of a CAS. In my university, a certain software
> company wanted to charge R$ 400,000.00, which at the time amounted to
> more than US$ 250,000.00, the kind of money we don't have for just one
> software license...It might seem ridiculous for some in the U.S., when
> in fact it's sad...

It's true that the cost of a subscription is not negligible. But on the
other hand,
as Professor Schelter said, one is not safe with a commercial CAS. Just do
imagine what happened to those dependent on the commercial Macyma in
1999-2000. Therefore, Maxima is much more safe and the source code is
available too. I plan to prepare specialied Maxima code for my own needs.
The first example concerns the solution of a special class of PDEs
(including
the wave and Laplace's PDEs of interest to my students in civil
engineering).
More specialized code will be gradually prepared aiming exclusively at
my own courses for Civil Engineering Students here at the University of
Patras.

> Although your asking for Windows executables is understandable, I would
> hope to persuade you to use Free/libre Software. I haven't used Windows
> for 3 years now. I find that I have everything I need in Debian
> GNU/Linux. It has 9,000 binary software packages. Maintance is a breeze,
> all you do is type "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" and *all* the
> weeks software fixes in bugs and securities will be updated and upgraded
> in your system in an integrated fashion. Software doesn't brake and the
> system doesn't crash.

I agree with you with respect to the advantages of Linux. For young
scientists
it's easy to change from Windows to Linux. For me it's not so easy although
I am thinking about Linux and bought my first Linux book before few days.
But any change is difficult and it requires much time investment. Even a
change
to Maxima requires a serious time investment. I recently learnt to use
Freewarp
and I may be required to learn to use Cygwin and Migwin. Perhaps I will also
be obliged to learn to use Tcl/Tk especially if I will try to change the
XMaxima
messages to Greek (and this should be done some day)! I required 20 or 30
hours before making Maxima work correctly in Greek (both text and formulae).
The conclusion is that any change requires time and Linux is not an
exception,
but I will consider this possibility gradually. Now I have to learn to use
Maxima
very soon I mean and be ready with my first (elementary) student exercises
with Maxima up to the end of this month.

> 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 feel that if you can produce that
> using the teacher's pespective, with all the problems that will come up
> in the classroom, then Maxima and the community will benefit greatly.

I do not have the due experience with Maxima, but I have to work on
this point for my students here in Patras by providing some documentation
to them in Greek assuming that, gradually, it will become a small and
low-cost book with a CD-ROM (including Maxima) attached. Otherwise,
the wide popularity of Maxima in Greece I dream now will surely fail. The
documentation is absolutely necessary even more necessary than a new
release! I am sure you can also help on this direction with respect to the
Maxima Book under preperation (but much more has to be done)!

>
> Best regards,
>
> Henry Lenzi

Many sincere thanks for your comments and active participation in this
Maxima project.

Best regards from Patras,

Nikos