Mathematica is a scientific calculation package developed by Wolfram
Research.

Mathematica is an impressive piece of software, because contrary to
other technical symbolic calculation software, it is based on a real,
well-designed *(programming language), hence can be extended in ways both
clean and advanced, allowing for incremental enhancements. Thus, even if
a given version of Mathematica does a few things not as well as a rival
software, Mathematica will win on its overall capabilities, and can
easily be made to further scale up on the long run, whereas the rival
software just can't adapt.

Unhappily, it is expensive proprietary software only, thus cannot
benefit from open development in a free world. This is a very sad
situation, as the world really needs some reliable, free (for in the
software world, freedom is the way to optimize reliability), symbolic
calculation software.

Mathematica is available for _(Linux) as well as for lesser platforms.

On the other hand, I've been told that I was overly generous towards
Mathematica (partly because I didn't use it deeply enough to see its
shortcomings, whereas Maple disgusted me).

Wolfram Research's WWW sites:
<UL CLASS="links">
<LI><A HREF="http://www.wolfram.com/">USA</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="http://www.wolfram.co.uk/">UK</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="http://www.wolfram.co.jp/">Japan</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf">A harsh criticism</A> written by Professor Fateman at Berkeley</LI>
</UL>
