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I am doing electrical engineering at the moment. My TI-89 calculator is no longer coping effectively with the level of maths being thrown at me at uni. I feel it's time to finally accept the fact I have no choice but to get a program like maple or mathcad and master it's use. So if I have to invest time in learning a CAS program which would be best in terms of how powerful it is and it's learning curve ?

Does your university not have any particular math software installed in computing labs? It would make most sense to learn that if it had since it would let you work from uni and at home.

If you're looking for free, there's wxmaxima

Pu-239 wrote:If you're looking for free, there's wxmaxima

And Sage, which is probably the most comprehensive open source math package. I'm not an engineer, though, and the only math app I have personally used (in a very limited sense) is Mathematica, which is commercial, but student licenses are fairly affordable.

The only app I've used is Mathematica also, which is what my college had us using/provided licenses for students in certain classes for certain assignments. I do recall the documentation being pretty good, which is a big plus if your going at it alone. Then again my degree is in CompSci, so my math exposure was more limited than pure Math people and different from the various Engineers. I beleieve I recall some of the Engineers talking about using MATLAB as well. One thing though, I recommend you check with your instructors regarding wether or not your allowed to use any of these kinds of software apps, as in my experience it tended to vary based on the professor, especially before committing to anything that costs money.

Matlab never did me wrong throughout my degree.

I liked Maple quite a bit; Matlab is really aimed at another market. As suggested earlier, Sage might be nice to try out due to its low, low cost.

From what I can tell, Maple is more symbolic math, useful for math majors. Matlab seems to be more engineering and science oriented, since it has a lot of useful features for those groups. I know that pretty much the entire engineering department at my school uses Matlab, so it's probably worth looking into. I don't have any experience with Mathematica or other software for math, so I can't help there.

Matlab. It is heavily used in industry (from what I have seen), so getting used it will give you an advantage when looking for jobs.

I have Matlab through the university (free license). I've only used it for linear algebra, in analysis the prof uses Maxima and Sage (he used another open source program, but I can't remember what it's called anymore) during the lectures.

Perhaps Octave? It's the open source substitute to Matlab.

Octave->Matlab
(Wx)Maxima/Sage->Maple

I'll echo all the calls for Matlab, as it's pretty much infinitely useful for any engineering application. Maple was pretty handy back when I had dedicated calculus courses, but I barely use it anymore. For electrical engineering, you'll definitely need a circuit simulator like PSpice, and probably a freeware VHDL simulator (gtkwave, etc).

Free or student versions of these programs often come in your textbooks, which can really cut costs, so check for that.

Pu-239 wrote:Perhaps Octave? It's the open source substitute to Matlab.

Octave->Matlab
(Wx)Maxima/Sage->Maple

That's the one, Octave. The prof. specifically mentioned because he uses it when working with students from the developing world, because it's they may not have access to a Matlab license.

I've worked with both Matlab and Mathematica; I'd say it depends what you want to do with it.

In my experience Matlab is probably the more versatile product, but if you're going to work primarily with symbolic equations you'd be better off with Mathematica.