ChapterZero

For anyone who hasn’t already encountered it, Axiom is the best (in my considered opinion) freely available CAS, hands down. The only competition that comes even close is Maxima, but Maxima’s interface leaves a lot to be desired. Axiom has the potential to be better than Mathematica or Maple, and in some ways, I believe it already is— certainly the type system is a stroke of genius.

Recently I added an unstable repository to my list of Debian mirrors; that has given me a lot of goodies to mess around with.

Most spectacularly, after dreaming about having access to Axiom, I just installed in on this server! Which means that I can run it over a text display only, since this is a rented server, but I’m working on that… nothing seems to be stopping me from installing X Window and tunneling a connection except for the fact that I don’t know how to configure X Window properly over SSH.

Hopefully sometime soon I will have Axiom hooked up so I can run calculations through it, have Axiom convert the results to TeX, and then pipe that back here. I’m not really that familiar with Axiom (I read most of the Axiom book a year or so ago, but never had the opportunity to play with a working version), but I could probably do this, seeing as how that looks like what the AxiomInterface does.

Axiom ports are available for Windows and Macs. Luckily I brought the laptop to school today, so I’m going to download Axiom for Windows and give it a spin. And order the Axiom book from the library again.

TexMacs– a beautiful, albeit rather mispurposed program– can be used as a GUI for Axiom, under both Windows and Unix.