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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

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 output). Idk if there's a better GUI.

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An alternative is to run maxima from jupyter: https://github.com/robert-dodier/maxima-jupyter.

Wow! This is fantastic! I got really frustrated with maxima frontends and just ended up sticking with Mathematica, but I'm going to give this a shot

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".

In this case, Sagemath contains a domain that interfaces heavily with Maxima.

By default Symbolic Calculus, which is a pretty common use-case since the space of integral-tables is huge and complicated, makes pretty heavy use of calls to Maxima as a backend, but it can slip over to SymPy, and some others pretty easily.

Sagemath is, a little rough to use as a novice-y math guy, really quirky especially since Python isn't as up-front with typing as I would like, and I've run into some lazy-evaluation confusion as well, but if your time is worthless, use-case restricted it can be an alternative to paying out the nose for Mathematica.

While I generally agree with you, but I'd like to point out that Sagemath is more than a "Mathematica alternative". It seems like Sagemath is a better fit for some fields like cryptography, given its strong support for operations related to abstract algebra.

Sagemath is, a little rough to use as a novice-y math guy

Yeah I mainly used it in my real analysis, complex analysis, and differential geometry classes. Also used it a bit in an intro cryptography class to play around with some rings and solve assignment problems.

I'm using Python right now in a neural networks class and I hate it. It's absolutely horrible to debug. You press run and then your neural network starts training and then craps out with divide-by-0 after a long time and no clue as to where the offending code might be.

> Yeah I mainly used it in my real analysis, complex analysis, and differential geometry classes.

Any pointers to how one would use it for real analysis?

Thanks.

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

In college, I used to use Maxima with KDE's Cantor as a frontend.

https://cantor.kde.org/

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...

There is also maxima.el in MELPA https://melpa.org/#/maxima

       rlwrap maxima. Use your Emacs keybindings from the shell (actually, readline) into it.

imaxima is a Maxima mode for Emacs which renders equations in the Emacs buffer:

https://sites.google.com/site/imaximaimath/

> Imaxima provides a graphical user interface front-end for the computer algebra system Maxima in an Emacs buffer. Imaxima processes the output from Maxima with LaTeX to beautifully render the mathematical formula. It inserts the rendered math formula image in the buffer.

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