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Wolfram Research Releases Mathematica 7
mblase writes "Wolfram Research has released the seventh version of Mathematica, and it does a lot more than symbolic algebra. New features range from things as simple as cut-and-paste integration with Microsoft Word's Equation Editor to instant 3D models of mathematical objects to the most expensive clone of Photoshop ever. Full suites of genome, chemical, weather, astronomical, financial, and geodesic data (or support for same) is designed to make Mathematica as invaluable for scientific research as it is for mathematics."
Maxima is released under the GPL.
Octave is a free version of Matlab, practically all your Matlab code will work in Octave.
You don't have to throw that code away or port it to an entirely different language (though Python rocks, and I wish my day-to-day job let me use more of it) Try GNU Octave - that's what I used to back in college because my department didn't have licensed copies of MATLAB installed/available, so-called student versions were insanely impossible and expensive to get hold of (Indian students can't afford $100), and I didn't want to pick a pirated one like the rest of the class.
Possible the first open-spurce software I practically used (except playing with Linux).
Code was very cross-compatible between Octave and MATLAB, except say constants like "e" and "exp" (and of course the MATLAB-specific toolkits). The toughest part at that time was explaining to the professor (who had no idea what "open-source" was) that I did *not* use MATLAB, but it would run on MATLAB fine if he wanted to check that my assignments work fine.
Sage http://sagemath.org/ is coming pretty good. Version 3.2 will come out in just a few days.
And you can use Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, Magma, Maxima, etc from inside Sage if you have those programs available.