In my previous post I superficially compared the most evident math programs from the commercial and free/open source fronts. Evidently, I was aware that such a small sample was not comprehensive but I was surprised when I found out how small that sample really was.
While searching Wikipedia for math related software I came across several interesting items. You will find, for example, good descriptions of all the packages we talked about, but what really caught my attention were three pages comparing the main features of a large number of programs. I think it would be rather difficult for a single person to collect all this information, sort out the details and display everything nicely in a table, not to mention keeping all the entries up to date. This is a true community effort!
The first page compares programs that can manipulate mathematical expressions symbolically. These are now called "Computer Algebra Systems" (CAS) and are epitomized by Macsyma:
Comparison of computer algebra systems
The second page is about numerical software. There is, of course, a lot of overlapping between these two categories (and the third one below), but the prototypical example here is Octave:
Comparison of numerical analysis software
Finally, this third page concentrates on programs that can create graphics. Again the overlap is big, but there is a table specifically comparing plotting programs, where our favorite example would be Gnuplot:
List of information graphics software
I'm sure there are many more programs out there that didn't enter these lists, either because they are too specialized or because they haven't reached maturity yet. Anyway, the landscape of math programs presented by Wikipedia is much wider than the one I painted last time!
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