I'm a mature student enrolling at a Maths degree course soon at the university. I'd like to be able to use some software package to help me visualize equations, graphs, play around with variables with some sort of sliders, watch the results, use that to help me understand Maths better.
Not interested in "real world" stuff for now (realistic simulations for engineering purposes and stuff like that). Just a good piece of software that I can use to better understand and manipulate and visualize mathematical principles; but at the same time something user friendly enough to allow me to concentrate more on the maths side of things, rather than spending all of my limited time fighting with the software to achieve the most menial of tasks.
I understand there's always a learning curve involved when picking up a new piece of software, I'm not afraid of that. But different packages will have different curve steepnesses...
Don't care if it's commercial or open source software.
I've been reading about Mathematica, Maple, Matlab and something called Sage. Looks like these are the main players in this market.
Any opinions on which software should I invest in to help me with my studies? Again, mostly to visualize and understand Maths. No need for anything more elaborate for now, although no problem if the potential for growth is already there.
Thanks!
If you happen to own a Macintosh, the application named Grapher ( it's inside the utilities folder) seems to be a great application for visualizing results. It is very easy to start out with and can produce some very involved visualizations.
SAGE is free but it's visualization capabilities depend on getting Gnuplot to work correctly. I haven't gotten results equal to the commercial packages (the three Ms). Mathematica has so much support that I would probably recommend it above Maple and Matlab. Although , to some extent this will depend on getting a hands on copy to play with. Although I once owned a copy of Matlab and have it running on a much older machine I can't get a newer version to play around with, cost is prohibitive for me. So Maple is number two, I'm still learning it. Your results will certainly vary. Try SAGE first, maybe you'll have better luck with the Graphics package.