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Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

maxima.sourceforge.io

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#21
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses gnuplot I think as its frontend. Gnuplot is quite powerful if you understand it and can trick it correctly. Regarding the interface being ugly it kinda also depends on which graphical frontend gnuplot is using, there are multiple. I like the Qt one.

nothing beats emacs & maxima-mode https://community.linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/maxima-emacs...

Except when it doesn't work. I tried using it a few months ago on both Windows and WSL, but I had to give up and resort to run a Maxima kernel on EIN.¹

I was going to try again before commenting, but I broke my WSL setup last week and didn't have time to fix it yet, but I sure will try it again next month.

¹ http://millejoh.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook/

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#22
post #8

How does it compare to SymPy?

If you need programmability or interoperability, Sympy is way nicer. If you just want an interactive symbolic calculator, Maxima is fine but sometimes quirky (has odd conventions due mainly to its age). As heisig points out, Maxima can be quite a bit faster (but I run into slow things with it too). Using Maxima via Sage is in some ways the best of both worlds.

You may also be interested in SymEngine: https://github.com/symengine/symengine

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#23
post #14

Quick 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?

What is Sagemath then? I have used it many times and I assumed it was a CAS alternative to Maxima. Is it actually just a big library built on top of Maxima? Sort of like how LaTeX is a library on top of TeX?

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sagemath uses maxima internally, so Jupyter notebook backed by Sagemath kernel might be useful?

What is Sagemath then? I have used it many times and I assumed it was a CAS alternative to Maxima. Is it actually just a big library built on top of Maxima? Sort of like how LaTeX is a library on top of TeX?

Sagemath used a collection of libraries.

From the front page:

> SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers.

For once "many more" really means "many more".

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#25
post #14

Quick 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…

there's a texmacs frontend too: http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/documents/tutorials/maxima-tuto...

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#26
post #25
post #14

Quick 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…

there's a texmacs frontend too: http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/documents/tutorials/maxima-tuto...

There's also imaxima a mode for Emacs that will format the output as rendered LaTeX.

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#27
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a texmacs frontend too: http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/documents/tutorials/maxima-tuto...

There's also imaxima a mode for Emacs that will format the output as rendered LaTeX.

Does that still work or is it abandoned? Do you know how to install it on doomemacs (I'm not an emacs or doomacs gurú)

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#28

Ahh, the macsyma days. You could do real tensor calculus with it.

Cadabra does that extremely well:

https://cadabra.science/notebooks/tensor_monomials.html

did publish an article with a Lagrangian of order 40 in the fields with it. 10k pages of calculations.

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also imaxima a mode for Emacs that will format the output as rendered LaTeX.

Does that still work or is it abandoned? Do you know how to install it on doomemacs (I'm not an emacs or doomacs gurú)

It does still work! Not sure if actively maintained though...

I think the process is a bit different depending on your OS. On Linux it's often bundled as a package for example on Ubuntu it's called maxima-emacs. I only use pretty vanilla Emacs so I'm not sure how that would interact with Doomemacs. You could try the manual install directions from the page perhaps [0].

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/imaximaimath/tutorial-of-imaxi...

Re: Maxima: A computer algebra system written in Common Lisp

#30
Maxima enabled me to make my color space [HSLuv](https://www.hsluv.org/). I encoded CIELUV RGB transformation functions into Maxima, ran `solve` and converted the output back into code. It's great to be able to commit [Maxima code](https://github.com/hsluv/hsluv/tree/master/math) into your repository and not leave the math as an "exercise to the reader".
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