> To be sure, $140 sounds like a lot of money for a student. But I am
> apparently out of date. A quick check at Amazon shows that college
> calculus textbooks go for $100-200, as do graphing calculators. I also
> learned recently that the going rate for AP Math tutoring is $80-120 per
> hour... Given that a CAS is something you presumably use in many of
> your courses if you're a hard science or applied math major, $140
> suddenly sounds positively reasonable....
You may think of other people from other nations (e.g. Hungary or worse
economical situations) who cannot afford buying student version of
Mathematica for $140, even not for a grammar school teacher as well. :-)
Maxima may be a good choice for the Hungarian education in all level: to
ensure having a licensed version of a commercial CAS on all computers of a
computer room we should pay too-too much. Earlier (before I heard about
Maxima and started to use it) my idea was MuPAD which is free for
educational purposes, however it has a memory limit without registration.
In fact MuPAD has a progressive GUI and as I heard it now supports
notebooks. However, source code of MuPAD is of course not free and public
so it remains a closed software and this implies that its future is
unsure.
Regards, Zoltan