18 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
18 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
|
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. 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.
|