Software is the means by which computer hardware is controlled by the end user. The mathematics community were among the first to write programs for computers to aid in research. This page supplies some links to various computer software that may be of interest to mathematics students and faculty.
The operating system is the software underpinning of a computer, controlling startup, shutdown, user logging, file transfers, application use, hardware devices, and much more. This is by no means an exhaustive list of operating systems, but a sampling of free and commercial operating systems available for use at home and school. Note that some operating systems have hardware requirements that your computer at home may not fulfill.
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Ubuntu, from their website: "Ubuntu is a community developed, linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need - a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more." |
| Fedora, from their website: "Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join." | 
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FreeBSD, from their website: "FreeBSD® is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon™), amd64 compatible (including Opteron™, Athlon™64, and EM64T), UltraSPARC®, IA-64, PC-98 and ARM architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development." |
| Microsoft Windows is the dominant force in operating systems on American desktops and laptops. The most popular current Microsoft Windows operating systems are XP and Vista. Chances are you are viewing this page on one of those two operating systems. | 
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Mac OS X is the current operating system exclusively for use on the Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro, and the rest of Apple's line of computers. |
A web browser is a piece of software used to view web pages on the Internet. Microsoft Windows comes bundled with the Internet Explorer web browser, and Mac OS X comes bundled with the Safari web browser. Some alternative web browsers and support software for them are listed below.
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Mozilla Firefox is a robust web browser which allows tabbed browsing and many different plug-ins and extensions. |
| Opera is another strong web browser that supports tabbed browsing and its own plug-ins and extensions. | 
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Adobe Flash Player is necessary to view interactive Flash websites and videos on such sites as YouTube. |
Office productivity software includes word processing, spreadsheets, basic databases, presentations, and document preparation.
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OpenOffice.org is a free alternative to Microsoft Office products. You can use it to view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on almost any operating system. |
| Adobe Acrobat Reader is the most popular PDF reader, available for most computer operating systems. | 
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There are software packages to aid with algebra, calculus, differential equations, statistics, and other calculation-based mathematics. Some are freely available online (like Sage), and others may cost hundreds of dollars. Check with your campus to see if there is a site license available through the school, or if there are educational discounts.
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SAGE is a free, open source alternative to expensive mathematics software packages such as Mathematica and Maple. It includes interfaces to most major mathematics packages, and uses the Python programming language to allow integration of programming with mathematics, as well as many older open-source mathematics packages such as GAP. Download it here or try it online here. |
| Mathematica, one of the preeminent commercial mathematical software packages since its initial release in 1988, combines scores of symbolic mathematics tools into one suite. It relies on its own programming language to produce its results. | 
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Maple is another of the most popular commercial mathematical software packages. It was originally developed in 1980, and relies on menus to build reports and projects. |
| MATLAB (short for "MATrix LABratory") is a programming language produced by The MathWorks. It is used primarily for numerical computing, and can interface with Maple. | 
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TeX is the most widely used mathematical typesetting language. The American Mathematical Society has a large list of links to various free versions of Donald Knuth's mathematical typesetting language TeX (and its expanded form, LaTeX). |
| SAS (originally Statistical Analysis System) is a commerical suite of software packages for developing programs for statistical analysis. | 
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SPSS (originally Statistical Packages for Social Sciences) is a commercial suite of applications for data mining and statistical analysis. |
| PSPP is a free open source GNU-based alternative to SPSS. It interprets commands in the SPSS language. | 
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Logo images courtesy their respective websites under educational fair use doctrine.
Last modified February 22, 2008