[Tugindia] maths software hassle

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Hello,

The discussion on mathematics software is *not* TeX related and
is totally out-of-band but since many TeX-users are also users of
mathematics, here goes...

There are more "specialised" packages:

	gpari		(For number theory/symbolic math/elliptic
			curves)

	macaulay/macaulay2 (For commutative and homological algebra)

	gap		(Group theory)

Gpari can also give LaTeX output! The PostScript it uses for plots is
also clean. There are detailed books describing the algorithms used
in Pari. The author H. Cohen won an award for this work. All in all,
my only (minor) complaint with Pari is that the manual is in *plain*
TeX (rather than LaTeX).

Some "toy" gpari samples related to crypto can be found in

	http://www.imsc.res.in/~kapil/crypto

One can also use Emacs CALC to do simple polynomial algebra. It too can
output LaTeX.

To summarise, it is more than 10 years since I had to use a proprietary
package to do computational mathematics (I used Mathematica(TM) about 12
years ago).

Kapil.

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