Symbolic mathematics on Linux

Re:Symbolic mathematics on Linux by a_e_k on Thursday January 05, 2017 @09:14PM (#13333366)

Emacs' calc can also be surprisingly powerful. Not quite at the level of Maxima, but still perfectly capable of basic symbolic algebra and calculus, arbitrary precision arithmetic, linear algebra, and other good things.

I use it quite heavily since it's right there in my editor. It's kind of like a good-enough phone camera that's always close at hand vs. a dedicated camera that's better but takes more effort to have ready.

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Re:Symbolic mathematics on Linux by 50CNT on Friday January 06, 2017 @12:35AM (#13334210)

The Emacs Wiki does describe it as the "poor man's Mathematica". Org-tables with Calc functions are also quite nice.

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Re:Symbolic mathematics on Linux by pmiller2 on Thursday January 05, 2017 @09:19PM (#13333401)

That's neat. I had no idea calc could do calculus!

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Re:Symbolic mathematics on Linux by a_e_k on Friday January 06, 2017 @03:19AM (#13334725)

It can indeed! Adapting the first example from the article, in Emacs type:

    M-x quick-calc RET
    integ(exp(-x^2),x) RET

You'll see that it immediately responds back with:

    erf(x) sqrt(pi) / 2

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Re:Symbolic mathematics on Linux by agumonkey on Thursday January 05, 2017 @10:12PM (#13333613)

I always facepalm when I do math outside of Emacs. Calc was never really advertised, it's not a toy.

Also I've heard it might be scraped from vanilla emacs and made into an extesion, but I may be confused.

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