Maxima

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For other uses of "Maxima", see Maxima (disambiguation).

Maxima is a free computer algebra system, written in Lisp and released under the GNU General Public License. The software runs on all POSIX platforms such as Unix, BSD, and Linux as well as under Microsoft Windows.

Maxima is based on a 1982 version of Macsyma, which was developed at MIT with funding from the United States Department of Energy and other government agencies. A version of Macsyma was maintained by Bill Schelter from 1982 until his death in 2001. In 1998 Schelter obtained permission from the Department of Energy to release his version under the GPL. That version, now called Maxima, is maintained by an independent group of users and developers. Maxima does not include any of the many modifications and enhancements made to the commercial version of Macsyma during 1982-1999 (at least 50 man-years of work). Though the core functionality remains similar, code depending on these enhancements may not work on Maxima, and bugs which were fixed in Macsyma may still be present in Maxima.

Various graphical user interfaces are available for Maxima. wxMaxima is a cross platform GUI based on wxWidgets. The GNU TeXmacs mathematical editor program can be used to provide an interactive GUI for Maxima. Other options include the imaxima front end as well as an Emacs interaction mode.

Maxima includes a complete programming language with Algol-like syntax but Lisp-like semantics, so it can readily be used for teaching programming and computer algebra.

Since Maxima is written in Common Lisp, it is easily accessed programmatically and extended, as the underlying Lisp can be called from Maxima.

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Numeric calculations

Like most computer algebra systems, Maxima specializes in symbolic operations. It also offers special numerical capabilities such as arbitrary-precision arithmetic: integers and rational numbers which can grow to sizes limited only by machine memory, and floating point numbers whose precision can be set arbitrarily large (bfloats).

For calculations which use floating point and arrays heavily, Maxima offers the possibility of generating code in other programming languages (notably Fortran) which may execute it more efficiently.

Maxima is a general-purpose system, and special-case calculations such as factorization of large numbers, manipulation of extremely large polynomials, etc. are often better done in specialized systems.

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