Wolfram Alpha Needs an Open Source Version

Re:Wolfram Alpha Needs an Open Source Version by rm999 on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @04:35PM (#5063172)

It's been a long time since I used Mathematica, but I always used it for symbolic computations (e.g. "derivative of x^2 = 2x"), especially when I was learning calculus and differential equations. As far as I'm aware R doesn't even natively have a way of storing symbolic equations, let alone solving them (at the least, it's not its main use-case).

But I could be wrong; I used mathematica and R for very different things so I may just be unaware of their similarities.

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Re:Wolfram Alpha Needs an Open Source Version by mbq on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @08:29PM (#5064517)

In principle R language is equally potent than Mathematica's one (functional+self-modifying), so Mathematica clone can be done in R (and in fact there is a built-in function "D" which calculates derivatives of native expressions symbolically).

Of course this won't ever happen because of the paradigm -- R is for data crunching and does this way better than Mathematica.

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Re:Wolfram Alpha Needs an Open Source Version by larrydag on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @06:22PM (#5063839)

https://code.google.com/p/ryacas/ to name one. It's not native but yet so aren't a lot of libraries in other languages.

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Re:Wolfram Alpha Needs an Open Source Version by owyn on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @08:27PM (#5064503)

Hasn't been updated since 2007... math doesn't really change that often but that does not look promising...

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