Cheap/Free alternative to Maple?

[Jaxidian]

Anybody know of a cheap/free alternative to this that can handle solving functions with variables? For instance, if I have the following function:

x = a + b

If I ask it to solve for a then it will come back and say:

a = x - b

but if I ask it to solve for b then it will come back and say:

b = x - a

It doesn't need these variables to actually have values, it can work with the variables themselves.

We also need it to handle some more complex things such as heaviside and dirac functions. Even if it's not out-of-the-box, if we can somehow program such functions that would work.

Thanks in advance!!

 

[nweaver]

do you know perl? should be able to do something like this (depends on complexity) pretty easily I would think.

 

[StevenYoo]

Text

this is what I found on Google for "Free math software"

 

[Bowsky]

If you're a student, you qualify for student pricing which brings the price down to $100. The nice thing is they will let you activate on two machines (they did with me at least). The $100 is seriously worth it if you are going to be using it in a lot of your classes. If you only need the program for a short amount of time, MapleSoft use to offer cheaper Maple licenses for short periods of time: $40 for three months, $60 for six months iirc.

If you still can't afford any of those options I have had some friends tell me that Maxima (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/) works pretty well for them, although I myself have never used it.

Hope this information helps.

 

[Jaxidian]

This is for business use, not for academic use, so academic discounts don't help at all. I actually have a student license for Maple but it prevents me from using it for any business use so that leaves me dropping $1400 to buy a legit license or to illegally use it (something I'm not going to do).

The specific application that we have that we want to use this in is a complex ROI calculation that will occassionally change time to time and we want to be able to keep it in literal syntax for business requirements purposes rather than just keeping it all hard-coded in code and tweaking the code. The reason for this is so business analysts can analyze the function at any given time to tweak it to be more accurate. The kicker is that they need to solve for one of any 12 given variables (the other 15ish variables don't need to be solved for but this should give you a general idea of how complex the equation is).

I have no idea how I would write a perl app that can take a literal function and solve for any given variable but that's what we need to do, more or less. And again, we're using Heaviside and Dirac functions, both of which Maple works wonderfully with but I don't know what else does.

Thanks for the help so far! If we have to drop $100 on this, that's fine. I consider $100 cheap when compared to the $1400 alternative.

-Jax

 

[Fenixgoon]

matlab > maple

 

[Jaxidian]

Unless it's changed recently (past 4 years), Matlab requires values for all unknown variables before it can do much of any solving. I want to keep the solved equation in terms of unknown variables.

I agree with you that if you have actual data for the variables then Matlab > Maple in general but with all of these unknowns, I remember Matlab not being very useful at all for that.

 

[beer]

Originally posted by: Jaxidian
Unless it's changed recently (past 4 years), Matlab requires values for all unknown variables before it can do much of any solving. I want to keep the solved equation in terms of unknown variables.

I agree with you that if you have actual data for the variables then Matlab > Maple in general but with all of these unknowns, I remember Matlab not being very useful at all for that.

Symbolic toolbox FTW

but it's no cheaper than Maple.
Are you confined to Windows for this?

 

[Fenixgoon]

Originally posted by: beer

Originally posted by: Jaxidian
Unless it's changed recently (past 4 years), Matlab requires values for all unknown variables before it can do much of any solving. I want to keep the solved equation in terms of unknown variables.

I agree with you that if you have actual data for the variables then Matlab > Maple in general but with all of these unknowns, I remember Matlab not being very useful at all for that.

Symbolic toolbox FTW

but it's no cheaper than Maple.
Are you confined to Windows for this?

IIRC, matlab essentially has maple plugins to let it do symbolic algebra