17 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
17 lines
1.2 KiB
Text
Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had its origins in the late
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1960s at MIT. It is the only system based on that effort still publicly
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available and with an active user community, thanks to its open source
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nature. Macsyma was the first of a new breed of computer algebra systems,
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leading the way for programs such as Maple and Mathematica. This particular
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variant of Macsyma was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until he
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passed away in 2001. In 1998 he obtained permission to release the source
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code under GPL. It was his efforts and skill which have made the survival of
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Maxima possible, and we are very grateful to him for volunteering his time
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and skill to keep the original Macsyma code alive and well. Since his
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passing a group of users and developers has formed to keep Maxima alive and
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kicking. Maxima itself is reasonably feature complete at this stage, with
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abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver, but
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there is a lot of work yet to be done in terms of bug fixing, cleanup, and
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documentation. This is not to say there will be no new features, but there
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is much work to be done before that stage will be reached, and for now new
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features are not likely to be our focus.
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