azzxxx at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I need to learn a computer algebra system. I have come to a choice
> between Reduce and Maxima, but their capabilities look quite similar
> to me.
> So, can anyone provide a comparison of these systems and tell what are
> significant differences between them and which tasks are they best
> suited for?
>
> Thanks.
I have colleagues who are in the heavy formal computation business and
like very much reduce. They say that reduce is more performing for big
computations than the other tools. Also reduce has tools for computing
Feynman diagrams if your interest lies here (nowadays people use a lot of
mathematica for that, or specialised packages). On the other hand reduce
has a quite strange syntax while maxima is quite close to maple, so very
usual. For the usage i have, it has proved performant enough, and it is
flexible and amenable to all sorts of computations. Also you have
a community, very useful to answer questions...
The other option is to buy commercial stuff, personally i have access to
maple and mathematica, but i have not used them since several years finding
everything i need in maxima (in fact i have used them once for
working with elliptic integrals that maxima doesn't do, but i finally did
the job by hand). By the way there is also axiom, on which several
prestigious researchers have contributed (eg Manuel Bronstein) but i don't
know any colleague using it.
--
Michel Talon