Comments For Entry #388

Math software(Comments RSS)

Doug poses a good question, which one of the software packages is better.

We you should probably also throw at least Maple into the mix. You can accomplish a lot of the same with any of them. I believe Matlab was originally designed for numerical computations involving large matrices. Prior to this one had to write or use a commercial Fortran subroutine to solve a linear system by Gaussian elimination. In Matlab this and other standard computations are built-in commands.

On the other hand Mathematica, like Maple, was designed with symbolic calculations foremost in mind. While it is certainly true that numerical computations can be done with Mathematica, this is typically not the driving force in choosing to use this program.


 

2/9/2006 2:06 AM

At the risk of starting some sort of cartoon war, I assert that Mathematica is the best of the two packages (note that in no way can Maple be considered a math package -- it doesn't even mention math in the title). Mathematica, although clearly optimized for symbolic computation, still has a reasonably powerful numeric engine. In all seriousness, are there any reasonable head to head reviews? I haven't used Matlab enough to comment on its capabilities.

Similate

2/9/2006 9:01 PM

It's not an apples to apples comparison. They were designed for different things, i.e. numerical vs. symbolic calculations.

Albert

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