Linux Math software (was Simple math considered physics...)

[Jim Kuzdrall]

On Wednesday 21 November 2007 23:27, Brian Chabot wrote:

> Also, to bring this more on topic, as a push for FOSS, with open
> source software you could use available source code for ballistics
> and aerodynamic modeling in order to find the exact answer here.  In
> a closed source world, you'd have to start from scratch...
>
> In terms of education and its promotion, it might be interesting to
> use baseball physics to get students more interested who otherwise
> might not be...

    Has anyone tried Maxima for Linux?  I use its predecessor, Macsyma, 
on Win98 and absolutely love it.  No, more honestly, I invested enough 
time working with it to become proficient - and don't want to go 
through that again.

    A link to Maxima is at maxima.sourceforge.net.  It gives some 
history of the public domain version (now GPL).

    Macsyma started at MIT in 1969, government funded.  Amid much 
controversy, it was licensed to Symbolics in 1982 for commercial 
distribution.  According to my manual, it represents over 200 years of 
software design, 300K lines of code.  That doesn't count the years put 
into the Fortran packages that it absorbed.

    By the way, my brother-in-law is a carpenter, and even when asked to 
add up the grocery bills, he is looking for a piece of wood to do the 
arthmetic on.  The habit is ingrained, I guess.

Jim Kuzdrall