Hi all,

I'm looking for a versatile program to do mainly statistical math for printing purposes. I would need a flexible program that can handle e.g. complex algebra, but, however, I would prefer a GUI based program due to the fact that after programming the equations, one does not want to do that again with some editor to get it on paper with good looks.

Any recommendations?

b.

well matlab would be the market leader here, also maple runs on linux too.

Thanks for the fast reply. A small respecification: no market leaders. Matlab is familiar and capable but wouldn't pay for it.

b.

I would go with Mathematica. No matter what other people say, Wolfram makes this the best math program on the planet. I have used it both on Windows and in Linux, and loved it. There is no better program I have used which even comes close. Mind you unless you are a student, it is quite expensive.

I was a math major, and used this program a lot for about 4 years. I used it for 3d modeling and graphing, expresional algebra, and all sorts of other uses in various classes. I tried many others, and for my range of uses, I couldn't find another program which did everything it does, or works as well, or a quickly. It is also massively powerful, a friend of mine used some programming to pass primes through mathematica for 1024 bit key cracking for one of our Computer Science and let's just say 1024bit isn't as big as it used to be. This was 3 or 4 years ago now, and even then on a P4 1.5 it took far less time than we thought.

Thank's for the tip.

Mathematica is completely new to me, and certainly go and find out whether my university provides a license for that.

Now I mainly do econometric and applied research so the 3d modelling and related stuff is not really needed. For basic calculations I've used mainly the great R project, Ox / PcGive, Gauss, etc. Another program in that front is not really needed.

Managed to write few papers with LaTex but it is not sufficient when things get a bit more complex.