Sage and Mathematica are both very powerful mathematics tools. For an absolute beginner both packages will do, I suppose.
Mathematica is closed source and for the price of a full edition Mathematica package you can also buy a state-of-the-art Sony VAIO or other sexy netbook or tablet you are thinking of buying. The Mathematica programming language is a so called propriety language. That means that it is only used in Mathematica and the owners of Mathematica can change the language whenever they want. Mathematica has a steep learning curve. Now that I master the basics of it I am very satisfied with what Mathematica can do for me.
Because Sage says it is possible to integrate Mathematica into Sage ( haven't figured yet out how, I suppose I need the Mathematica for Linux version ) I am having another look at Sage. Sage is Linux only but you can run it entirely from within a browser. So you can install Sage on a Linux server ( for example in a VMWare virtual machine ) and run it on Windows in your browser.
( More later about my Sage findings. )
http://www.sagemath.org/
Notes on Blackbody radiation
2 years ago
Sage is not linux only. It runs on a Mac running OS X too, and is fully supported on OS X. Binaries for any released version of Sage will be made available for OS X.
ReplyDeleteSage will also build on Sun's Solaris 10 operating system, though the process is not quite as easy as linux.
Whilst Sage will run in VMware, VirtualBox has been found more relieable
Sage is very easy to learn. It has a powerful tab completion system that will list all of it s function. It also has a detailed explanation for every function with examples. I found that I became proficient at using sage within a day or so after downloading it. It also helpful that sage runs natively on linux because I use linux on a majority of my computers.
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