Maxima is a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical
expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series,
Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear
equations, polynomials, sets, lists, vectors, matrices and
tensors. Maxima yields high precision numerical results by using exact
fractions, arbitrary-precision integers and variable-precision
floating-point numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and
three dimensions.
The Maxima source code can be compiled on many systems, including
Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. The source code for all systems and
precompiled binaries for Windows and Linux are available at
the
SourceForge file manager.
History
Maxima is a descendant of Macsyma, the legendary computer algebra
system developed in the late 1960s at
the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. It is the only system based on that effort still
publicly available and with an active user community, thanks to its
open source nature. Macsyma was revolutionary in its day, and many
later systems, such as Maple and Mathematica, were inspired by it.
The Maxima branch of Macsyma was maintained
by William
Schelter from 1982 until he passed away in 2001. In 1998 he
obtained permission to release the source
code under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It was his
efforts and skill which have made the survival of Maxima possible, and
we are very grateful to him for volunteering his time and expert
knowledge to keep the original DOE Macsyma code alive and well. Since
his death, a group of users and developers has formed to bring Maxima
to a wider audience.
Maxima is updated very frequently, to fix bugs and improve the code
and the documentation. We welcome suggestions and contributions from
the community of Maxima users. Most discussion is conducted on
the Maxima mailing list.
