with a bit of elbow greece you can also integrate it with your common lisp application. and i mean this entirely, not just in an api sense
GREASE
ela re
Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
11–20 of 70 posts
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#12How does it compare to SymPy?
Maxima is a surprisingly good alternative to SymPy. We had to learn that the hard way at my job. Both systems offer similar functionality, but it turns out Maxima is typically 50-200x as fast as SymPy for many tasks (I guess because it was written at a time when computers were slow and expensive). For our application, switching from SymPy to Maxima shortened the time-to-solution from hours to minutes.
Also, it shows that Maxima has been in use for a very long time, and maintained by very bright people. I have yet to encounter a bug in Maxima. And I have already encountered plenty of bugs and inconsistent behavior in SymPy.
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#13Ahh, the macsyma days. You could do real tensor calculus with it.
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#14Quick note to avoid disappointment: maxima itself is a text application. wxMaxima is a graphical front-end with conventional math notation. Output only. You'll frequently encounter text/command-line options, though. E.g., when you pick a command like differentiate from the menu, and you want to apply it to the previous result, you'll have to enter something like %o10 (no need to guess; you'll see the reference in the output). Idk if there's a better GUI.
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#15Plus points: Does not suffer from the time limits of free wolfram and the nlp parsing issues in general with wolfram Negative points: Somewhat more limited repertoire, and things sometimes need to be rephrased or rearranged to trick an answer out of it.
Interesting. I just downloaded Maxima on Android and also WolframAlpha. Three latter is light years ahead.
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#16How does it compare to SymPy?
Maxima is a surprisingly good alternative to SymPy. We had to learn that the hard way at my job. Both systems offer similar functionality, but it turns out Maxima is typically 50-200x as fast as SymPy for many tasks (I guess because it was written at a time when computers were slow and expensive). For our application, switching from SymPy to Maxima shortened the time-to-solution from hours to minutes. Also, it shows…
Maxima sees serious 'more free' versions of computational algorithms that migrate out from less free acedemic systems.
On the computational real actual algebra side (ie. a bit past computing a quadractic at 'x') a number of things that appear in Magma follow into Maxima (but not all the things, although with time they will come).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Field_Equations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%B6bner_basis
The first HFE cryptosystem challenge of J. Patarin is solved by Magma in 82.5 seconds, using 1.3GB memory; with 4 threads the time taken is just 29.0 seconds. This involves solving a system of 80 quadratic equations in 80 variables over GF(2) (each input polynomial has about 1600 terms). The challenge was first solved by J.-C. Faugère in 52 hours on an 1GHz Alpha in 2002 using his unpublished F5/2 algorithm. At the time of writing, there is apparently still no publically-available software besides Magma which can solve the challenge.
https://maxima.sourceforge.io/docs/manual/maxima_257.html
Notes on the grobner package: The code is a little bit out of date now. Modern implementation use the fast F4 algorithm described in "A new efficient algorithm for computing Gröbner bases (F4)" Jean-Charles Faugère
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#17How does it compare to SymPy?
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#18Plus points: Does not suffer from the time limits of free wolfram and the nlp parsing issues in general with wolfram Negative points: Somewhat more limited repertoire, and things sometimes need to be rephrased or rearranged to trick an answer out of it.
Interesting. I just downloaded Maxima on Android and also WolframAlpha. Three latter is light years ahead.
Well there’s a surprise
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#19Quick note to avoid disappointment: maxima itself is a text application. wxMaxima is a graphical front-end with conventional math notation. Output only. You'll frequently encounter text/command-line options, though. E.g., when you pick a command like differentiate from the menu, and you want to apply it to the previous result, you'll have to enter something like %o10 (no need to guess; you'll see the reference in the…
Sagemath uses maxima internally, so Jupyter notebook backed by Sagemath kernel might be useful?
Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp
#20Quick note to avoid disappointment: maxima itself is a text application. wxMaxima is a graphical front-end with conventional math notation. Output only. You'll frequently encounter text/command-line options, though. E.g., when you pick a command like differentiate from the menu, and you want to apply it to the previous result, you'll have to enter something like %o10 (no need to guess; you'll see the reference in the…
An alternative is to run maxima from jupyter: https://github.com/robert-dodier/maxima-jupyter.