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Mathmatica, mathcad, maple?

C

CountZero

Golden Member
One of my classes highly recommends using one of these math programs but I'm not terribly familiar with the differences. If anyone can give any insight that would be great.

I will be using it for a semiconductor opto-electronics class. So lots of symbolic DE, derivation, integration and plotting solutions (plotting is required for the class but I'm sure they all do it). Another class I'm taking does involve some statistical stuff so if these do that as well it might be a nice bonus.

So out of these which would you choose and why?

Thanks!
 
Originally posted by: compnovice
matlab>*

But symbolic representation is a pain...

Out of the three I have just used Mathematica...
Click to expand...

I need to use matlab for another class but I'm not terribly familiar with it, my understanding was it doesn't do symbolic. Any truth to that?
 
really can't go wrong with either mathematica or maple for symbolic stuff. mathcad was a joke compared to the other two, at least ~4 years ago when I was in college. I dunno how much progress they've made, but from what I remember Mathcad had a more modern/user friendly gui (e.g., compared to mathematica), but the backend wasn't nearly as sophisticated as mathematica's.

matlab's symbolic toolbox is a bit of a hack and I don't think you'd want to use it if you had access to the others.
 
I've used all three, but I'm only experienced in Maple and Mathcad.

Matlab can be roughly considered to be a nice to use Maple (I think they have the same kernal). Maple is quite possibly the worst program ever written for user-friendliness. You will spend many, many hours frustrated with Maple and it's thousands of functions that seem to do the same thing by the description but are subtlely different. Then you'll spend many more hours in useless frustration as Maple complains that you don't have the syntax correct. Finally when you get your result, Maple will graph it with a nice graph that has the X and Y axis plotted with just infinity written on all locations so the graph is useless. Thus Matlab > Maple.

Mathcad does lots of things well and is very simple, very user-friendly, and quick to learn. But it is no where near as powerful as Matlab or Maple.

So it all depends on your goal. Are you planning to do advanced research on the software (get Matlab)? Or are you just looking for a tool to aid in undergrad/graduate classes (get Mathcad)?
 
I use Maple.. but that's because I worked there once.

I believe Matlab = numerical computation and maple = symbolic computation. If I'm thinking of matlab correctly

*edit*
I didn't even answer the original question.
Sorry, can't be much help though. I'm not too sure which to use.
 
So the consensus more or less seems to be Matlab for numerical hands down and its a bit of a toss up between the others MathCad is a bit weak, Maple is a pain to use and Mathmatica is decent.
 
Originally posted by: CountZero
So the consensus more or less seems to be Matlab for numerical hands down and its a bit of a toss up between the others MathCad is a bit weak, Maple is a pain to use and Mathmatica is decent.
Click to expand...
I'd agree with that statement.
 
I have Mathematica 5.2.

It's incredibly powerful. Hard to believe how much it'll do.
Very expensive.
Takes a while to learn.
To me it seemed difficult at first, but once you get familiarized with it's syntax it's great.

Mathematica notebooks are available free all over the web to download & use, providing tutorials and models for diverse situations & applied subjects (stat, biology, various engineering, economics, tons more). There are user groups online too, such as Google groups, to help each other.

I haven't experienced the others (Maple, Matlab, MuPad, MathCAD, or the free Maxima).


Edit: THis should help you.

15-day free test drive


This gives you a helicopter view of what it's like:
Some Mathematica Tutorials
 
Also, a lot depends on what you want it to use for further.. I know Matlab is/can be used exstensively in Mechanical Engg, Photonics, EE and also in Finance.

Mathematica is good but is cannot match matlab in modeling and computation. (thats what my beleif is)
 
I've only used matlab and can say that its pretty easy to work with. If you get stuck trying to figure out how to do something there is usually a ton of tutorials you can find through google. Also you can write m-files to do just about anything, and if your familiar with c its easy to jump right in. Right now I'm taking a class about semiconductors that uses this book which has many matlab examples and exercises.
 
Each of these products serves a particular purpose. It is best to understand what the strenghs/weaknesses are and use the appropriate tool for whatever task you will be undertaking.
 
If you learn on mathematica first, it shouldn't be a problem. I thought it was a piece of cake to use for diff eq's, calc, linear algebra, numerical analysis... I did my senior thesis using mathematica - that was a pita, but still not that difficult. (A lot of programming and animations)
 
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