good math program??

can someone tell me which math program is better Mathematica or maplesoft. I am planning to buy one of these but the student edition. thanks in advance

 

please someone answer me i need to buy it immediatly.

 

If you're in a real rush, I'd suggest doing a Google search for the two and reading up on it to see which one better suits your needs...good luck though!

 

having used both, i think mathematica was the better program and more user friendly. maple was like using a TI-89 but slightly more advanced.

that's just my opinion though, i can't honestly say which one is more powerful.

 

Maple has a terrible user interface. Mathematica is much more user friendly. I would recommend Mathematica, but a licence for that costs a few hundred pounds more than Maple.

 

I got a free copy of Maple in a class, so know it is useable, but not the friendliest.

 

Here is an alternative, if you are open to it.
MathCad. It is POWERFUL and easy to use. Basically, it is like a really really smart white board, if you are smart enough to write your problem down in mathematical terms, it is smart enough to solve it.
The only drawback I have found is that it is kind of tricky to solve a series of ODEs over and over again.
Hope this helps.

 

I've used a lot of math programs, it really depends on what you're being taught and using at your particular school, imho.

 

Mathematica has easy to use interface. Or have you tried another software,Matlab, it's more powerful than Mathematica.

 

I second the Matlab recommendation. Be warned though there is a significant learning curve and it does require programming knowledge. To a casual user it is pretty cryptic. Nevertheless, it is powerful.

 

I would like to make it clear that I do not advocate any sort of file sharing, except for the sharing of one's own files between computers of one's own choosing.
However, I also notice that this program is incredibly expensive, so I found two things:
1) They offer a free 15-day trial of Mathematica here:
http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/trial.cgi
2) I did notice that it is readily available through other means, which may or not be legal; if they are legal, I do not encourage such means.

Howie

 

MATLAB and Mathematica are good for different things. MATLAB is better for working with matrices (that's what it's intended to do) and multi-dimensional array. It's also a full-fledged programming language that you can write and test algorithms in (albeit it's slower due to its interpreted nature). Mathematica is better with symbolic math.

 

My vote is for mathematica. mathcad is nice for keeping track of units, but programming in it was more difficult than in mathematica. Mathematica will also do statistics for you- confidence intervals and so on. Very useful for manipulating and analyzing data from my experiments. Mathcad is good for simple things, mathematica is good for complicated things. What do you want to do with the program? Homework or data analysis?

 

i already order mathematica thanks for your suggestions . i will be using it for doing precal homework. my professor suggested me to get a math program like mathematica or maplesoft so that i do the homework more quickly and that i will learn more rapidly.

 

What is the world coming to...

 

I was tempted to write in my first response to "buy a good book on Numerical Analysis and program it yourself--you'll learn more".

 

You are right, I am sorry no give clear explanation between both