On 3/16/07, Alasdair McAndrew <amca01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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:
>
> are there any "simple" problems which one would expect Maxima to be able to
> solve, but which it can't?
> is there any functionality in which Maxima is better than its rival?
I've given a talk discussing Maxima and one topic which seemed to
"wow" a few people was Barton Willis' topoly command. Here is a
copy and paste from a Sep 2006 email of his:
(%i1) topoly(x-sqrt(2),false);
(%o1) x-sqrt(2)=0
(%i2) topoly(x-sqrt(2),true);
(%o2) x^2-2=0
(%i7) topoly(sqrt(2)+sqrt(3)-x,true);
(%o7) x^4-10*x^2+1=0
(%i8) solve(%,x);
(%o8)
[x=-sqrt(2*sqrt(6)+5),x=sqrt(2*sqrt(6)+5),x=-sqrt(5-2*sqrt(6)),x=sqrt(5-2*sqrt(6))]
(%i9) map(lambda([e],topoly(e,true)),%);
(%o9) [x^4-10*x^2+1=0,x^4-10*x^2+1=0,x^4-10*x^2+1=0,x^4-10*x^2+1=0]
You can also do such things using polynomials with symbolic
coefficients.
> 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.
I won't call this a "greatest strength" but the fact that it is cross
platform and
relatively small (in hd memory space) are plusses IMHO. Another plus is
the fact that (since it is free and os) you can find web interfaces for some
of it's basic functionality. Many times in teaching, this is all that you need.
I know one instructor teaching a numerical analysis course who needs
symbolic differentiation at only one or two pints in the semester. He uses
one of the web interfaces linked to from the Maxima web page for his
class is is happy with that.
>
> Thanks,
> Alasdair
>
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