Paul Dawkins

Software

This page is devoted to some nice software for mathematics.

Typesetting software

Typesetting and formatting mathematics in documents can be painful at the best of times. Depending on what you want to do and what other software you've got on your computer.

TeX/LaTeX
The ultimate typesetting software has got to be TeX/LaTex. This is a full blown typesetting software that can do just about anything that you might possibly want. Best of all it's free. The problem is that it's not really software. It's more like a programming language. So, while it may be the best out there, it's got a fairly steep learning curve.

So, what is TeX/LaTeX? TeX is the main typesetting tool and LaTeX is a set of macros that have been built on top of TeX to make the experience a little easier. LaTeX doesn't offer as many formatting options, but is much easier to use. As I mentioned earlier both TeX and LaTeX are more like programming languages. There are version out there for just about any programming environment that you could want and to use it you'll need a good text editor to actually type up the document.

Here are a couple of links with more information and where to get a version and a good editor for a Windows environment.

TeX Users Group - This is a nice site with lots of information about TeX/LaTeX as well as providing links to CTAN, the main repository of the TeX/LaTeX archive. At the CTAN site you can download the latest version of TeX/LaTex.
LaTeX Project - This is the main page for the LaTeX set of macros. They provide links for downloading it and documentation.
MIKTeX - This is probably the best Tex/LaTeX version out there for a Windows environment and best of all it's free although it's a fairly large download.
WinEdt - This is the best editor for TeX/LaTeX for the windows environment that I've run across. It's also the only piece of software in the TeX/LaTeX section that isn't free. It's $30-$70 depending on whether you are are student, education institution or commercial, but it is well worth the cost if you are going to be doing any kind of serious math typesetting.

MathType
This is an equation editor for Microsoft Word by Design Science. In fact, I believe that Design Science wrote the equation editor that is included with Word. MathType is a supped up version of this and is capable of a lot of mathematics. It isn't quite as good as TeX/LaTeX in the formatting area, but is very easy to use. It is also capable of exporting Word documents to web pages and that's always a nice thing.

The problem with MathType is that it isn't free and even with an education discount it's expensive (~$100). However, if you are doing lots of mathematics, and don't want to be hassled with the constant compiling documents and fixing errors that comes the TeX it is very work the price. In fact, I use MathType to generate the pages for my Online Math Notes web site.

Symbolic Math Software

This is software that is capable of doing symbolic mathematics. All of the software listed here is very nice, but very expensive.

Maple - This is the software that I use. It's very nice and easy to use. It is capable of doing some graduate level mathematics!
Mathematics - This is another piece of software along the lines of Maple. I haven't used it recently, but it was a worthy piece of software the last time I used it.
MatLab - This is a very powerful piece of mathematical software. It is not as user-friendly as Maple and Mathematica, but if you are going to be doing any kind of computationally intensive work this is the program for you.