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Conference rusure::math

Title:	Mathematics at DEC

Moderator:	RUSURE::EDP

Created:	Mon Feb 03 1986
Last Modified:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	2083
Total number of notes:	14613

1413.0. "Affordable MSDOS mathmatics software?" by FMCSSE::HEINTZE () Thu Apr 04 1991 22:06

    I would like a catalog of mathmatical tools that perform symbolic
    manipulation for performing my home work for graduate level EE classes.
    
    I thought that mathcad (student edition for $40) would do symbolics. 
    It does not.  I am pleasantly surprised to find out it still very
    useful. 
    
    Maple is pretty good, but I have not seen it advertised for MSDOS. 
    MACSYMA would be great (BYTE did a review on it within the last couple
    of years) but $2000 is just too much money.
    
    I've seen mathmatica for MSDOS for $600 but that is still too much
    money.  Some of this stuff just is not that difficult.  You can
    actually do some pretty useful stuff in a couple hundred lines of
    prolog source code.  I'm tempted to buy TURBO prolog and type in the
    integral tables from the CRC.  But this is tedious and I still would
    not have a nice user interface.  
    
    Mathcad has a great user interface,
    better than Maple or Macsyma.  Mathcad is actually and math editor that
    performs numerical integrals and differentials, vector and matrix
    operations.  I was pleased to see it would allow me to define a
    function that returned a vector I could subscript.  Too bad it does not
    do symbolics!

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
1413.1	Don't hold your breath	CIVAGE::LYNN	Lynn Yarbrough @WNP DTN 427-5663	`Fri Apr 05 1991 09:58`	24
	> ... Some of this stuff just is not that difficult. Well, sure, SOME of it is not that difficult. But when you start combining things the difficulty ramps up quite fast. > ... You can > actually do some pretty useful stuff in a couple hundred lines of > prolog source code. I'm tempted to buy TURBO prolog and type in the > integral tables from the CRC. Historical note: The SNOBOL language was designed to solve problems in this space, and there have been some pretty good differentiators etc. built with it. That turned out not to be the problem, which in the time it was first used was mostly the lack of good algorithms, but partly the exponential growth in complexity with the size of the problem. For an example, try solving a 4th-degree polynomial with MAPLE or MACSYMA etc. There is a closed-form solution, but it takes many pages to print it because of the number and complexity of terms, a couple of orders of magnitude longer than the solutions for quadratics. I wish you good luck and great insight. Maybe you'll come up with something cheap and useful. (Have you looked at the HP whizbang pocket calculator?) If you do, let us know.
1413.2		TIGEMS::ARNOLD	Some assembly required	`Fri Apr 05 1991 14:26`	10
	Don't know exactly what you're looking for, but for some VERY affordable math software, you might want to check out some of the MS/DOS SHAREWARE software. There is a sampling of what is available in TIXEL""::DUA1:[MSDOS.STATISTICS]. Or if you know exactly what you're looking for, at least in terms of capabilities, you might want to post a note in the TIXEL::IBMPC_SHAREWARE conference. Press KP7 to add that conference to your notebook. Good luck Jon
1413.3	Brooks-Cole "student" MapleV	CIV009::LYNN	Lynn Yarbrough @WNP DTN 427-5663	`Thu May 28 1992 10:44`	4
	The MAPLE people have announced, through Brooks-Cole publishers, an MS-DOS "student" version of MapleV for $99+taxes & handling. It has all the features of the VMS version except some of the packages, and the graphics and other features are great. See the MAPLE conference for details.