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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

The wx-maxima[1] is a good GUI for maxima. A very nice mature FLOSS symbolic math package. For derivatives, integrals, simplification and many other uses I don't think it is nowhere weaker than proprietary alternatives.

[1] https://wxmaxima-developers.github.io/wxmaxima/

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WxMaxima (+Igor Pro) is what got me through my P Chem and QM courses in college. The joy of teaching yourself linear algebra because they forgot to list it as a course requirement. Luckily all you really need is rref.

  > Luckily all you really need is rref.

Tell us more. Please. I'm going through linear right now.

Transforming a linear matrix equation to Reduced Row Echelon Form (rref) [1] allows solving it very easily or writing a minimal set of variables in terms of others if you don't have enough independent equations or discovering that the set of equations is contradictory. You naturally arrive at this form if you were to do manual Gaussian Elimination, but linear algebra libraries have additional efficient ways to arrive at this depending on the structure of the matrix. So it's common to just ask the algebra system to get it there and then use the matrix either programmatically or by hand depending on what you're trying to do.

[1]: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_echelon_form

Terrific, thank you!

SMath is a nice mathcad like interface with Maxima support

Unfortunately my experience is that Maxima is unable to get even simple integrations right.

If I remember correctly the state of the documentation was subpar too.

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