
Symbolic Math - A Workflow - thealphanerd
http://www.hippasus.com/resources/symmath/index.html#.UTBt2jkOTYQ.hackernews
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lutusp
> This workflow/tutorial is designed to remedy these three problems. The tool
> chosen - Maxima - is available for free, as is all its supporting software
> ...

Hey, knock yourself out, but Sage (<http://www.sagemath.org/>) integrates, and
improved on, Maxima, and represents a much more advanced free tool for
symbolic mathematics.

Also, there's Sympy (<http://sympy.org/en/index.html>), a Python library that
does symbolic mathematics and would be a much better and simpler way for you
to explain and demonstrate symbolic mathematics in a tutorial. Let's use Sympy
to solve a quadratic:

    
    
        from sympy import *
        var('x a b c')
        sol = solve(a * x**2 + b * x + c,x)
        print(sol)
        print(latex(sol))
    

Output:

    
    
        [(-b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a), -(b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a)]
    

Rendered Latex: <http://i.imgur.com/Z4yKvkq.png>

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thealphanerd
Thanks for the heads up. I'm taking a signal processing class at the moment
(<https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/420/>) and the professor is an old school
unix guy. He still lives in emacs. That being said I am totally open to
various different languages / environments to do symbolic mathematics. I don't
have a background in mathematics, so I feel my time might be better spent
learning higher level concepts then trudging in the algebra trenches

