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Another math major here (in my final year). My professors routinely use square brackets after the second or third level of bracket nesting.

I think it must depend on the professor/university.

This is a known issue in Mathics that has been fixed in the upcoming version 0.6 (soon to be released).

Mathics vice dictator here btw.

Take a look at Mathics [1]. It's a FOSS Mathematica clone with browser-based notebooks. You can try it free online [2]

[1] http://mathics.org/ [2] http://www.mathics.net/

Disclaimer, I'm the Mathics vice developer.

Apparently it couldn't withstand all the traffic from HN (potentially due to all the server side python). It's up again now.

You can always download it and try it locally: http://www.mathics.org

Edit: If anyone is interested in getting involved, we are always looking for contributers. The full code is on github: https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics

For those in search of a FOSS alternative, give Mathics a try: www.mathics.org

In the past couple of months, Mathics had made quite a lot of progress.In particular the upcoming release will run on PyPy. Obviously it still had lots of catching up to do, but being written in python (and some Mathematica) makes development easy and fast. Come join us!

Disclaimer: Mathics vice dictator here

You should check out Mathics; It's a free and open source implementation of the 'Mathematica language' written in Python.

Admittedly, there are bugs, and the performance is not as good as Mathematica, but a lot of progress has been made (For example, PyPy compatibility is planed for the upcoming release). Give it some time, and I think (hope) it will grow to fill this niche.

Also, The fact that Mathics is open, allows you to extend it (in Python for example) with minimal effort.

Disclaimer: I contribute to Mathics development in my free time. We are hoping to get more people involved!

Mathics has about 25K lines of python of which only about 10 lines are platform specific. There are also about 100K lines of JS, but much of it is automatically generated or libraries. Admittedly it is missing lots of the features of Mathematica, but I think its an interesting comparison to make.

Disclaimer: I'm a developer for Mathics

Anything you write for them is accepted. In fact of these captchas you only need to get one word correct (the non-maths one). IIRC the other is scanned from a book somewhere and the computer used to scan it couldn't figure out what word it was.

Yeah, mostly because it is proprietary and crashes often (Mathematica 8 especially).

The vast majority of students in my program are non-programmers. The only 'programming language' they know is mathematica which I think is a real shame.

Worse than that is that most of them have developed a dependence on Mathematica; without it they are severely limited in what they can do. We are provided with free copies (student version), but once we graduate will have to pay the full price if we want to continue using it.

I guess I just don't like having my abilities to solve problems tied to an expensive, closed source program. I do admit, it is very powerful.

I am an undergraduate physics student, and we are forced to use Mathematica on a weekly basis. I avoid it whenever possible, but this is what I've been looking for. Awesome!

Computational maths (research area of mine) is its own field, and is very different to computer science.

A introductary (undergrad) computational mathematics course at my university covers; numerical solutions to PDEs, Inverse problems, Regularisation problems, numerical optimisation etc.