ive been trying to find a good program for doing advanced math and equations, that dosnt require me to put in most of the work my self.. (yes im lazy id admit that much.) i have several for windows, but havent found any that actually work for Linux based systems...found many that claim to be advanced math progs with all the std. equations built in, but non of them have been what they claimed. so if any of you forum hoppes out there know of some great math progs for physics and astronomy please post links!
Not sure exactly what you are looking for but here are a couple suggestions. They are not toys and don't hold your hand, but there is a lot of documentation online and in books and youtube videos. Of the three below I like iPython the best. But they are all free. They are all notebook style programs so they can produce very nice documents with graphics and mathematical typesetting through latex. GNU Octave is something like MatLab. https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ iPython can do a lot but requires some knowledge of the Python programming language, but can also be programmed to a less extent in other programming languages. I like the Anaconda version because it is very simple to install and maintain. It can also format mathamatics using latex. https://www.continuum.io/downloadsiPython has many specialized libraries. For instance: Matplotlib can do some interesting graphics. see the examples page: http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html Numpy is the numerical library: http://www.numpy.org/ Sympy is the symbolic math library: http://www.sympy.org/en/index.html Pandas is for doing data analysis: http://pandas.pydata.org/ Astropy is for astronomy: http://www.astropy.org/ and many more. R is mainly for statistics (I think). https://www.r-project.org/ Never really used it but it looks very nice. If you have a raspberry pi, there is a free version of Mathematica and Wolfram Language. http://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ I have used this on an older pi which was a little slow but usable, the newer Raspberry Pi versions should be a lot faster. You can use your regular computer to ssh or vnc into the pi. There are lots of youtube tutorials on how to do this. I don't know much about SAGE but here is a link. http://www.sagemath.org/ I think that SAGE is mainly for symbolic math.
R is awesome for graphing datasets. The only one of the above that I'm able to use (because of my limitations, not Linux.) I know about Octave, but thanks for the links to the others. I'll have a look.
Update: I can highly reccomend Sage, its a very nice program. abel to deal with rather extensive equations. Likewise, GNU octave, is quite fine. How ever documentation lacks in some areas, but after working thew a few kinks, the program offers a ton of usability.
Octave largely mimics Matlab in terms of syntax and functionality, so a lot of the Matlab documentation applies equally to Octave.
