I’m a Maple fan, and using Maple in many of my everyday tasks is really my passion. I love to use it to derive more theoretical support for my projects. (for those who do not know what the Maple is, it is a computer application that unlike many regular computer languages like fortran and Matlab, solves and derives the formula symbolically)
Yesterday I was reading an article in the eWeek magazine about the “Killer apps of all time” and recognized that Mathematica is one of them
I have put off using Mathematica for a long time however I know that in many mathematical tasks it is even faster and smarter than Maple (my friend who is working on his PhD in physics told me that Mathematica can find the singular matrices faster than Maple and it sometimes tests the singularity by multiplying two rows before actually finding the determinant) as we all know Mathematica was made by Dr Wolfrom who got his PhD when he was 20
Another reason that I didn’t want to migrate to Mathematica from Maple was that the “Symbolic Toolbox” of Matlab actually uses Maple as its kernel
let me enumarated the pros and cons of using Mathematica over Maple:
Pros:
- Faster, Smarter
- Cheaper (student version is free for both Unix and Win)
- Better customer support in the US (Maple is a Canadian company)
- Is one of the 25 Killer apps
Cons:
- Maple is more user friendly
- Maple is a part of “Matlab Symbolic Toolbox”
- I already know Maple 😉
Decision:
I’ll move towards the Mathematica gradually while keeping my Maple knowledge. Probably I’ll remove my Maple from my laptop for a while and install Mathematica instead for a while in order to force myself to learn it 🙂