You can find a bunch of things that Mathematica does wrong (and Maxima may
do right) in my review of Mathematica, which I have linked to my home page.
http:// <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf>;
www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf
As far as comparing the systems, a paper by Michael Wester seemed to show
(commercial) Macsyma in a good light, however those items might not be
implemented the same in Maxima.
In my view, the remarkable thing is that Maxima in 1982 was in many ways
better than Maple or Mathematica for the next 20 years. You can look at it
two ways:
If Macsyma had a 10 or 20 year head start, why isn't it much better?
or
If Mathematica had an example of a fairly complete system design in 1982,
why did it take 20 years to duplicate its features?
or maybe even a third way:
Why did it take 20 years to duplicate its errors?
I also wrote a review of Macsyma, in IEEE Knowledge Engineering. A copy of
that
is at
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mac82b.pdf
_____
From: maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu [mailto:maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu]
On Behalf Of Alasdair McAndrew
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 7:43 PM
To: maxima list
Subject: Talking about Maxima...
I've let myself in to giving a little introductory talk to my department
about Maxima. When I say "talk", rather than a slides-based seminar, I
intend it to be more of a demonstration, where I shall show a few of
Maxima's capabilities.
Now, many people in my department use Maple, and a few have used
Mathematica, and so I'd like to be able to compare Maxima to these two
products. Does anybody know:
1. are there any "simple" problems which one would expect Maxima to be
able to solve, but which it can't?
2. is there any functionality in which Maxima is better than its rival?
3. Aside from price and its being open-source, what are the greatest
strengths of Maxima?
Now, I can probably give rough answers to these myself, but it's always nice
to garner other views and opinions.
Thanks,
Alasdair