Maxima, a Computer Algebra System Maxima, a Computer Algebra SystemMaxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had its origins in the late 1960s at MIT. It is the only system based on that effort still publicly available and with an active user community, thanks to its open source nature. Macsyma was the first of a new breed of computer algebra systems, leading the way for programs such as Maple and Mathematica. This particular variant of Macsyma was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until he passed away in 2001. In 1998 he obtained permission to release the source code under GPL. It was his efforts and skill which have made the survival of Maxima possible, and we are very grateful to him for volunteering his time and skill to keep the original Macsyma code alive and well. Since his passing a group of users and developers has formed to keep Maxima alive and kicking. Maxima itself is reasonably feature complete at this stage, with abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver, but there is a lot of work yet to be done in terms of bug fixing, cleanup, and documentation. This is not to say there will be no new features, but there is much work to be done before that stage will be reached, and for now new features are not likely to be our focus.
It is licensed under GPL and hosted at SourceForge.net.
Maxima can be download from the http://maxima.sourceforge.net/download.html, which will redirect to sourceforge.net download page. It is available in Windows and Linux binaries as well as in source code form.
— Where can I get a Windows installer?
— Where can I get Linux RPM’s?
— Where can I get source code?
— Where can I get installation files for other systems?
Since William Schelter’s passing a group of users and developers has formed to keep Maxima alive and kicking. We are currently in a transitional state, deciding what directions to go in next and seeing what our abilities and resources are. Maxima itself is reasonably feature complete at this stage, with abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver, but there is a lot of work yet to be done in terms of bug fixing, cleanup, and documentation. This is not to say there will be no new features, but there is much work to be done before that stage will be reached, and for now new features are not likely to be our focus.
Yes. Maxima is distributed under the GNU General Public License, with some export restrictions from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Yes you can distribute Maxima, provided you keep the copyright notice intact.
Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had its origins in the late 1960s at MIT. It is the only system based on that effort still publicly available and with an active user community, thanks to its open source nature. Macsyma was the first of a new breed of computer algebra systems, leading the way for programs such as Maple and Mathematica. This particular variant of Macsyma was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until he passed away in 2001. In 1998 he obtained permission to release the source code under GPL. It was his efforts and skill which have made the survival of Maxima possible, and we are very grateful to him for volunteering his time and skill to keep the original Macsyma code alive and well.
The system developed at MIT was called Macsyma (although the nicknames MACSYM and MAXIMA were sometimes used since filenames were limited to six uppercase-only characters in sixbit character code).
Symbolics licensed Macsyma from M.I.T. and registered ”Macsyma” as a trademark at some point (presumably with M.I.T.’s permission).
When Macsyma source ceased to be freely available, pressure was put on M.I.T. (mostly by Fateman) to transfer the code which had been developed largely with Department of Energy (DOE) funding to the DOE, which then released it to others under certain conditions.
That codebase was called DOE Macsyma. I don’t know what legal rights the DOE had to the name Macsyma as opposed to the codebase, but presumably the non-commercial users of DOE Macsyma wanted to avoid any legal wrangling around the name, and started using the name Maxima at some point (but I don’t know when that was).
So the short answer as I understand it is that Maxima is simply the most recent name for the branch that started under the name DOE Macsyma.
We suggest something like
(or replace the version number and release year, if you are using a more recent one).
If you use Bibtex for your citations, we recommend that you add the following entry in your bibtex database:
@ELECTRONIC{maxima,
author = {Maxima},
year = {2011},
title = {Maxima, a Computer Algebra System. Version 5.25.1},
address = {http://maxima.sourceforge.net/},
url = {http://maxima.sourceforge.net/},
owner = {maxima},
timestamp = {2011.08.28}
}
clisp, CMUCL and GCL are fully supported by Maxima; previous versions of Maxima only fully supported GCL. Ports to other ANSI lisps should be straightforward and are welcome; please contact the developers if you are interested in working on a port.
See also http://maxima.sourceforge.net/lisp.html.
— When I try to install the Maxima rpm file, rpm complains that "maxima_exec" is a missing dependency.
maxima and maxima-exec. Go back to the SourceForge file manager and download a maxima-exec package and install that at the same time as the maxima package.
— When I try to install rpm files, rpm complains about failed dependencies on stuff other than maxima_exec.
$ sudo rpm -ih maxima-5.9.3.src.rpm $ cd /usr/src/local # or whereever it is that rpm puts the source code $ sudo rpmbuild -bb SPECS/maxima.spec
— I can launch the Maxima GUI (either Xmaxima or WxMaxima), but then there is a timeout message and I don’t get any response when I enter some expression.
Problem 1. Invalid entry for localhost in /etc/hosts file.
— I am able to build maxima, wxMaxima, and wxMac thanks to the README in wxMaxima. I constructed wxMaxima.app and maxima, placing them next to each other. After starting wxMaxima I used the preferences to set the location of maxima and verified that it started by adding console print statements to wxMaxima.cpp. However, every attempt at simply algebra reports "Not connected to maxima!". Before I try my hand at debugging this, your suggestions would be appreciated.