Mathematical modelling programs

[K.I.L.E.R]

Are there any free or open source mathematical programs that will allow me to set up a model and test it?

Currently I'm doing this through Java and it's a pain because I want to integrate my modelling done through pen and paper and quickly test it on my computer.

Does anyone know of such programs?

 

[_xxx_]

There is a cheap-o student license option for Matlab/Simulink, check it out on their homepage: http://www.mathworks.com/academia/student_version/

 

[StefanS]

Are there any free or open source mathematical programs that will allow me to set up a model and test it?

Currently I'm doing this through Java and it's a pain because I want to integrate my modelling done through pen and paper and quickly test it on my computer.

Does anyone know of such programs?

It would be a lot easier, if you'd describe what exactly you want to do:
Do you need the program only to integrate it or do you want to solve differential equations, etc? Do you need it more for symbolic processing or numerical? Do you want to create little programs within the program or do you need soley to use the results in other programs?

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

I want to solve the equations and such myself.

What I really want is to be able to bring up shapes in 3 dimensions such as spheres, planes, etc... of my own creation and test behaviours which are defined by my working out. Double click on sphere then change it's basis and stuff.

Currently I do this programmatically however I haven't officially built a program that could be used standalone, if nothing like this exists then I will make my own.

 

[StefanS]

Since you're emphasis is not on the mathematical side (i.e. symbolic processing) i'd second _xxx_'s recommandation. Matlab / Simulink should do the job.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

I certainly don't have the money.
Anything open source? I have SciLab but that doesn't do much of what I want.

 

[nutball]

If you're at a Uni you might find there's a campus license or similar arrangement for Matlab. It might not be free, but it could be relatively cheap.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

They used to have such an arrangement, not anymore.

If you're at a Uni you might find there's a campus license or similar arrangement for Matlab. It might not be free, but it could be relatively cheap.

 

[Mize]

There used to be a matlab-ish opensource product...ocean? something like that...lemme go look...

 

[Mize]

It's Octave I'm thinking of. I used it during my PhD work and it worked very well on my NeXTstation turbo color (and my HP-PARISC machine too, but I hated CDE).

Look here:
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~gerry/matlab.html

(edit: I'm assuming numerical modelling tools are what you're after and not symbolic manipulators. I had to use Octave because I spent my entire budget on Mathematica from Wolfram...are they still around???)

 

[_xxx_]

I certainly don't have the money.
Anything open source? I have SciLab but that doesn't do much of what I want.

Huh? The student version is maybe some ~$100 I think, it doesn't get cheaper than that.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

I'm a student, not a millionaire.

Huh? The student version is maybe some ~$100 I think, it doesn't get cheaper than that.

I'm checking out Octave.
Hopefully that will do what I want it to do.

 

[Simon F]

I had to use Octave because I spent my entire budget on Mathematica from Wolfram...are they still around???)

Does this answer your question?

For symbolic maths, I switched to maple because, some years ago, mathematica stopped working when a change was made to windoze and we never went back.

 

[stevem]

Went though the same saga myself with Mathematica->Maple/Matlab. Fortunately, we were site licensed (& still are) for most software. Nowdays I use more specialized software 99% of the time.

 

[Mize]

Way back when I was using this stuff (1988-1992) I vastly prefered Mathematica to Maple - at that time Maple was all command line and didn't have much (any?) graphical capabilities compared to Mathematica. Mathematica was horrendously inefficient, but handled fourth-order symbolic tensors very well.

 

[StefanS]

I was a Maple boy from the start. I tried Mathematica for a while, but I didn't like much. Plus they had a really annoying license scheme at my university, so I just didn't bother.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

For me, it was the transition from Mathcad->Maple->Mathematica->Matlab. Mathematica and Matlab exposure was both at UIUC (unsurprising that UIUC would have some ties to Mathematica as Wolfram is basically a 10-minute drive away). Though for my purposes, I'm usually far more preferential to Matlab even if for no other reason than the fact that it is a very linear-algebra-centric package.

Maple was a little more weird to me -- it was almost logoish, but it was handy in a few cases -- especially when I had to start playing with intersections of superquadrics. That and some more basic DiffEq was really nice and clean in Maple.

 

[SPM]

You might also want to look at MuPAD . It is commercial, but there is a free for non-commercial use download. http://www.sciface.com/

There are also "free as a bird" GPL packages (not all run on Windows though):

Octave: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

Maxima from MIT http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

JACAL http://www.swiss.csail.mit.edu/~jaffer/JACAL.html

CASA from the University of Linz http://www.risc.uni-linz.ac.at/software/casa/

Kalamaris http://perso.wanadoo.es/antlarr/kalamaris.html

The above do different things symbolic algebra, numerical solution plotting etc. so you will need to try them out to find if they do what you want.