Because it may not be obvious how much the user base appreciates you
all, I vote to give everyone on the list, but especially Robert Dodier
a big round of thanks and applause for all the work they've done on
Maxima. Making maxima more understandable, more well documented, more
actively developed, and more alive is a huge benefit to all of us.
I have had no time nor knowledge to contribute significantly to
maxima's code base, so I have mostly tried to contribute by pointing
out bugs or documentation problems, or asking useful questions that
others might later read via the mailing list archives.
As a relative novice mathematician with a distinctly applied flavor,
who doesn't know an elliptic integral from a grobner basis (but who
always enjoys reading the wikipedia or mathworld entries) I am
extremely thankful for the fact that I can use maxima to crank through
grubby algebraic problems and calculate taylor series and differential
equations and plot functions and do trigonometry and soforth. Solving
my bezier problem was so much more enjoyable using maxima than by
hand. The result will save hours and hours of measuring the lengths of
curves printed onto paper using a ruler.
Thank you all,
Dan
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan