Maxima is a FREE computer algebra system comparable to commercial systems like Mathematica and Maple. It emphasizes symbolic mathematical computation: algebra, trigonometry, calculus, and more. The program can calculate with exact integers and fractions, native floating-point, and high-precision big floats.
As a powerful system for handling symbolic and numerical expressions, Maxima offers an extensive range of features. It handles advanced calculus with tools for differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, and ordinary differential equations. Furthermore, it provides robust support for solving systems of linear equations and handling various data structures, including polynomials, sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors.
Get precise results you can trust with Maxima, which yields high-precision numerical results by using exact fractions, arbitrary-precision integers, and variable-precision floating-point numbers. To help you visualize your data, Maxima can also plot functions and data in two and three dimensions.
The software offers a comprehensive user-friendly experience through its intuitive interfaces, online manual, plotting commands, and numerical libraries. Thanks to a dedicated community, users can also write programs in their native programming language, and many have contributed useful packages in a wide variety of areas over the decades.
You can download the executables for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Source code is also available. An active community maintains and extends the system.
Maxima Features:
- It is specialized in symbolic operations while also providing numerical capabilities.
- It can be accessed programmatically and extended, as the underlying Lisp can be called from it.
- A complete programming language with ALGOL-like syntax but Lisp-like semantics.
- Arbitrary-precision integers.
- Rational numbers of sizes are limited only by machine memory.
- Arbitrarily large floating-point numbers (“bfloats”).
Maxima is a direct descendant of Macsyma, the legendary computer algebra system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s. Thanks to its open-source nature, it remains the only system from that foundational effort that is publicly available and supported by an active user community.
Maxima (/ˈmæksɪmə/) is a computer algebra system (CAS) written in Common Lisp and runs on all POSIX platforms such as macOS, Unix, BSD, and Linux, as well as under Microsoft Windows and Android. It is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
