Programming in Maxima
Recently, in one of my papers I needed to do somewhat involved polynomial algebra. Basically, adding and substracting polynomials in p and 1-p with degree n. The calculations were relatively straight forward, but I always make silly mistakes with such calculations. So, I decided to check my analysis using a computer algebra system. Matlab and Mathematica, perhaps the most popular computer algebra softwares (although Matlab is focussed more on numerical calculations), were out of the picture because they are commercial and I did not have site licenses for them. So, I googled a bit and settled on Maxima [...]
