Symbolic math software on the Nevis Linux cluster

To answer the question that led you here: No, at present we do not have Mathematica at Nevis; nor do we have Matlab or Maple. The licenses for these packages cost money, and must be regularly renewed. The Columbia site licenses reduce, but do not replace, these license fees.

Instead, the cluster offers the open-source alternatives to these mathematics packages:

• Maxima is a symbolic math package that's an alternative to Mathematica or Maple.

• Octave is a numerical computation package that can serve as a replacement for Matlab.

• R is the open-source equivalent to the statistics environment S-plus.

These packages are installed on every system of the Nevis Linux cluster.

You might also want to consider Sage, a Python-based wrapper around several public-domain symbolic math packages. It's not installed on the Nevis cluster (since it's not part of the Fedora distribution yet), but you can install it on your own computer without too much difficulty.

If you require one of the commercial packages for your work, it would have to be handled on an individual basis; we'd have to purchase a license for a particular computer on which you work for a specified interval of time. As an alternative, these packages are available at the campus computer lab and on the CUNIX server.

-- WilliamSeligman - 23 Jul 2008