anyone have experiance with more than one of these math programs? I have been using mathcad a lot but would be interested in learning mathematica or maple if they are significantly better. I am mainly interested in the program's formatting ability, for text, not just for equations.

i use my brain

LaTex does formatting...never actually used it though

It shows.

Maple is very powerful, very adaptable, and happens to be the math package of choice at UMR. Mathematica is about 90% as powerful as Maple and (usually) formats the answer into something a person would be likely to obtain. That way you don't have to go proving identities to show that your answer is identical to the Maple answer.

It all depends on the application. I'd use Maple because it's installed all over campus and it's what I'm most familiar with.

I liked mathcad better, but I really hate the stupid little quirks that all programs have with them. Just some tiny things killed these giant equations I had to do (also if you can't get it to work after hours on end, there isn't much in what you typed so it looks like you did next to nothing). But its a great feeling to jump up and laugh and cry at 3 am in the morning when your graphs and equations finally work out...

What type of mathematics are we talking about here?

If you already have solutions and simply want the ability to pretty-print equations and intermix them with text, LaTeX *is* worth a gander. Here's a getting-started page: http://azariah.cgore.com:8080/latex/index.html

NOTE: Chris Gore is a CS grad. student here at UMR, and I'm willing to bet he would answer any questions you can't easily locate via Google.

Sometimes it's easier to weild several tools in combination instead of one big tool that "does everything". For example, if I were doing numerical analysis, I'd stick to paper and MATLAB. MATLAB scripts have a straightforward syntax that's ideal for computations with matrices and vectors. Solve a problem on paper -> prototype your solution in MATLAB (you can later move to the MATLAB C++ Math Library if you need additional speed) -> then write-up your results using LaTeX.

Matlab is the preferred engineering math tool from what I understand.

thanks for all the info. after installing mathcad, maple 9, maple 10, and mathematica, it seems that Maple 10 is the clear winner for me. Maple 10 has a new feature (Document Mode) which is exactly what I was looking for. Basically a word processor with math display and solving abilities, so I can solve and type up my homework and lab reports at the same time, and this will eventually be much faster than handwriting homework and writeups (because, at least for me, I go much slower when I am trying to write neatly).