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There used to be free[beer] MuPad, but now that I look it up to post this comment, I see it is no longer free (beer or speach.)

(I looked at it about 3-4 years ago, but after a while I got frustrated with it and got my boss to buy me Mathematica 5. I no longer remember what it was that frustrated me.)

"MuPAD is a mathematical expert system for doing symbolic and exact algebraic computations with almost arbitrary accuracy"
Homepage. RPM
German software that will run on windows and linux. It will run graphically and also in a terminal.
Good Stuff.

If I remember correctly, you need to get a key to be able to use more than 6MB but the key is free for non-commercial use.

How does Octaveforge's symbolic algebra module compare with MuPAD? http://research.mupad.de/

Check this one out at http://research.mupad.de/. According to the website, "MuPAD is a mathematical expert system for doing symbolic and exact algebraic computations with almost arbitrary accuracy."; I know it includes several math libraries and has the ability of doing 2D and 3D plots... I don't think it is open source, but there seems to be a free (beer), older version for non commercial use under both Linux and Windows. Good Luck.

PS: I remember using an even older version quite a few years ago and it was really nice.

Not strictly Open Source, but free as in beer for Linux at least. It's now coupled with Scilab, so it's possible to do both symbolic and numeric maths with it. Just like in Mathematica.

...if you want something TI-82alike (and then some, of course), MuPAD seems promising. I say "seems" because I'm on FreeBSD, and ran into a bit of munge with the Linux binary port back when I tried to install it. (Probably all sorted now, or a vagary of library versioning on my particular installation, it's been a while.)

What bothers me about SciLab and Octave is the pain of graphing. I'd love to have an interactive algebra system around (the TI-82 being a basic version thereof, and bc... even moreso, before someone suggests that), but the joy of the old school TI was being able to both crank the math *and* plot the function instantly. IIRC, Octave requires you to poke the function into a matrix before you can plot, and SciLab might be good but relies on a whooole lot of buggy widgetsystem cruft... or I have it backwards.

Anyone have other suggestions in that vein? Basically, I want a 'command line for math' on the one hand (with the goodness of history, infix notation, trig functions etc), and the easiest possible graphing on the other; like an oscilloscope, looking at plots can help garner an intuitive understanding of what's going on.

MuPAD is a free-(beer)-to-academics-and-home-use Mathematica-like program.

I tried it for a while, but I have access to Mathematica so I'm using that (extensively.)

(Woohoo! I have a job where I get to play with Mathematica all day! Boy am I glad I changed - I wasn't doing anything with that extra $20K/year anyhow.)

(Mathematica pricing: ~US$1800 commercial, ~$900 academic, not sure about student - ~$150??)

Take al ook at mupad

It's some sort of mathematica lookalike, superior in some cases and they have free versions.

It's been a while since I used it, but it was great.

Ah well, I should have been a bit more careful before posting: Octave is not really a symbolic math program. So I wouldn't mind if my previous comment as well as all others that suggest using Octave were moderated down as "Offtopic"...

For symbolic math, maybe SciLab (Open Source, not much symbolic stuff but a bit of it anyway) or MuPAD (free but not Open Source) could help, although I haven't personally tested them.

You might try:
MuPAD
I've had good luck with it.

Jim