This is outdated. Please see open source math software for the latest version of this document.

Links to open source mathematical programs

My opinion: A result computed by a computer algebra system, whose source code is not "open source", can not be accepted as part of a mathematical proof. Within the general mathematical community, it seems fair to say that a mathematical truth is not a theorem unless its proof is written down for public scrutiny (i.e., "open source") and generally accepted as correct. Just as to verify the correctness of a theorem you can go through the proofs of all the results your theorem depends on, one should be able to verify the correctness of an algorithm by reading the programming code of all the algorithms your algorithm depends on. The programs linked to on this page seem to share this philosophy.

Axiom is a general purpose Computer Algebra system. It is useful for research and development of mathematical algorithms. It defines a strongly typed, mathematically correct type hierarchy. It has a programming language and a built-in compiler. Axiom is free and open source (distributed under a BSD-like license). See also the Axiom developer page.

GAP is a system for computational discrete algebra, with particular emphasis on computational group theory. GAP provides a programming language, a library of thousands of functions implementing algebraic algorithms written in the GAP language as well as large data libraries of algebraic objects. GAP is used in research and teaching for studying groups and their representations, rings, vector spaces, algebras, combinatorial structures, error-correcting codes, and more. The system, including source, is distributed freely under the GNU General Public License.

GINAC ("Ginac Is Not A Cas") does not try to provide extensive algebraic capabilities and a simple programming language but instead accepts a given language (C++) and extends it by a set of algebraic capabilities. See the tutorial for more details. It is free software distributed under the GPL.
Macaulay2 is a computer algebra system for algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. It is distrubuted under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

PARI/GP is a widely used computer algebra system designed for fast computations in number theory (factorizations, algebraic number theory, elliptic curves...), but also contains a large number of other useful functions to compute with mathematical entities such as matrices, polynomials, power series, algebraic numbers, etc., and a lot of transcendental functions. It is distributed freely under the GNU General Public License.

The Magnus Computational Group Theory Package is an innovative symbolic algebra package providing facilities for doing calculations in and about infinite groups. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (see doc/COPYING file) as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Copyright (C) 1994-2002 The New York Group Theory Cooperative.
Maxima is a general purpose Computer Algebra system. Maxima itself is reasonably feature complete, with abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver. Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had its origins in the late 1960s at MIT. Macsyma was the first of a new breed of computer algebra systems, leading the way for programs such as Maple and Mathematica. This particular variant of Macsyma was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until he passed away in 2001. In 1998 he obtained permission to release the source code under GPL.

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language. You may redistribute Octave and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation.

The R Project for Statistical Computing is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs stored in script files. See also CRAN for some mirror sites and extensions. It is free software distributed under a GNU-style copyleft, and an official part of the GNU project.

SAGE ("Software for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation") SAGE is a framework for number theory, algebra, and geometry computation that is initially being designed for computing with elliptic curves and modular forms. Hopefully it will be much more generally useful for algebra, geometry, and number theory. It includes (for example) Maxima, PARI, GAP, and Singular. It is open source and freely available under the terms of the GPL.
See also the local mirror for SAGE.
Singular is a Computer Algebra System for polynomial computations with special emphasis on the needs of commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, and singularity theory. It is distributed freely under the GNU General Public License.
The Singular team won the ISAAC 2004 Richard D. Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering for Computer Algebra.
Texmacs free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs. The editor allows you to write structured documents via a wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) and user friendly interface. The program implements high-quality typesetting algorithms and TeX fonts, which help you to produce professionally looking documents. The high typesetting quality still goes through for automatically generated formulas, which makes TeXmacs suitable as an interface for computer algebra systems. It has been configured already for Axiom, Macaulay2, Pari, for example. It is distributed freely under the GNU General Public License.

YACAS ("Yet Another Computer Algebra System") is a a program for symbolic manipulation of mathematical expressions. It uses its own programming language designed for symbolic as well as arbitrary-precision numerical computations. The system has a library of scripts that implement many of the symbolic algebra operations; new algorithms can be easily added to the library. YACAS comes with extensive documentation (320+ pages) covering the scripting language, the functionality that is already implemented in the system, and the algorithms we used. It is free software distributed under the GPL.

Created 11-14-2004 by wdj. Last updated 5-31-2007.