REDUCE has been open-sourced
REDUCE is a computer algebra system that has been in active development for over 40 years and is used by scientists across the world. Until recently you had to pay for it but it has now been made open source and so is available free of charge from Sourceforge. I have never used it but that may be about to change as it seems to have some very nice functionality. I lifted the following (incomplete) feature list directly from the application’s website
- automatic and user controlled simplification of expressions
- calculations with symbolic matrices
- arbitrary precision integer and real arithmetic
- analytic differentiation and integration
- factorization of polynomials
- facilities for the solution of a variety of algebraic equations
- calculations with a wide variety of special functions
- Dirac matrix calculations of interest to high energy physicists
So far, the only executable I have found is for Windows but I haven’t dug very deeply so more might be there. If are a user of REDUCE or if you have a play with it and find something nice then feel free to say something about it in the comments section.
Hi Mike,
I tried the window version, and it works in Wine.
That’s brilliant – thanks for letting me know.
What’s the software like? I still haven’t had a chance to look at it myself :(
I’ve been playing with it only for a little bit. My first impression is that it seems to be a solid program for symbolic math. It has some quirks that I’m trying to understand why. For example, i typed in “e+3”, and REDUCE printed out “4e+3”; but after I did the same thing again, it printed out correctly.