[geeks] Dang!

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 10:54:02PM -0600, Jonathan Eisch wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 6, 2002, at 10:28  PM, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> >Dude, get with the program.  Maxima is where the power is.  I should 
> >take
> >diffential equations.  I think I might graduate first then go back and 
> >take
> >it, that and partial differential equations.
> 
> I haven't worked with Maxima, what kind of program is it?  Under OS X, 
> Mathematica is sweet (animated graphs to .mov files in seconds, among 
> other things)
> 
> I think I might be in over my head a little, I've yet to graduate from 
> highschool...

Oh.  Long after Calculus, there are topics called Ordinary Differential
Equations and Partial Differential Equations.  These deal with problems
like 2i'^2 + i'' = 0.

Every symbolic math program has it's strong points and it's week points.
Mathematic's main strong point is that it is extremely competent at so
many things.  It isn't the best at anything, but it isn't very week
at many things either.  According to one professor I had, it is also
extremely good at generating random numbers.

Maxima is a free program, usually compiled with CMUCL (which is one reason
why I settle on using solaris for my Ultra1 so that I can use the host
of CMUCL programs I want).  It is text only, although there are graphical
frontends for it.  There are many problems that are more advanced than I 
really understand that Maxima can solve, but Mathematica fails at.  I'm
sure highschool math doesn't really touch much on such problems. 

Oh, beware of Mathematica's limit calculations.  This is one of the really
bad ones.  While limits are a particularly hard problem that one would
excuse most programs from failing at, Mathematica also makes really stupid
mistakes with limits sometimes.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd