Maxima is a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, and vectors, matrices, and tensors. Maxima produces high precision results by using exact fractions and arbitrarily long floating point representations, and can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions. The Maxima source code can be compiled on many systems, including Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. The source code for all systems and precompiled binaries for Windows and Linux are available at the SourceForge file manager. Maxima is a descendant of Macsyma, the legendary computer algebra system developed in the late 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 revolutionary in its day, and many later systems, such as Maple and Mathematica, were inspired by it.
Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language. Octave has extensive tools for solving common numerical linear algebra problems, finding the roots of nonlinear equations, integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations. It is easily extensible and customizable via user-defined functions written in Octave’s own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran, or other languages.
Scilab est un logiciel open source gratuit de calcul numérique qui fournit un puissant environnement de développement pour les applications scientifiques et l’ingénierie. Scilab est distribué sous la licence open source CeCILL (compatible GPL), et est téléchargeable gratuitement. Il est disponible sous GNU/Linux, Mac OS X et Windows XP/Vista/7/8 (voir les configurations système). Scilab contient des centaines de fonctions mathématiques, des fonctions graphiques 2D et 3D et un environnement de programmation.