About

We’re hoping that TheMaximaList will provide a hub for Maxima-focused content from across the web.  From installation to getting started to carrying out productive mathematics and preparing high-quality documents, this site can help students and professionals become increasingly productive with Maxima!

20 thoughts on “About”

    1. I had to change to a new Mac M1 and Maxima is not working. Is there a way to have it running with a M1 processor. thanks.

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      1. I was able to install Maxima available from Homebrew on M1 Mac and so far it seems to be working fine. It is also a native install for Apple Silicon.

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  2. Hi
    I have followed your instructions for installing Maxima on MacOs 10.12.6 on a 2016 MacBook Pro and am having problems with getting GNUPlot to draw graphs within the page using the wxplot2D command. I can get GNUPlot to draw the graph in a separate window using plot2D command. However, using the wxplot2d command I get an error message saying “can’t open the file /Users/sidebotham 1/ – I can send a full screen shot of the message. I have installed your terminal script. Am not a command line user!
    Any help would be much appreciated.
    Thanks David

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    1. David, thanks for your note.
      I wonder from the error message you quote if the space in the file name is causing lisp some trouble. Maybe switching flavors of lisp will help. try this:

      wxMaxima —> Preferences… —> Maxima,

      in the “Additional Parameters” text box type
      -l sbcl

      (those are lower case “L”, not 1)

      then close the window, restart maxima, and try the wxplot command again.

      Does wxdraw work as expected?

      fingers crossed…

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  3. Hello! Great site! I was going through your installation instructions for Maxima+wxMaxima on MacOS. If you were not aware already, Homebrew now has Maxima and wxMaxima formulas. The only two commands I needed to install everything was “brew install maxima” and then “brew install wxmaxima”. That was it! To start it up I just needed to type “wxmaxima” in Terminal. I haven’t experienced any issues yet other than initially the plotting functionality similar to what you described but slightly different. The fix for that was very trivial as described here (https://github.com/andrejv/wxmaxima/issues/973). Moreover, I wanted the ability to use the “Use cairo to improve plot quality” feature. To do that, I had to reinstall gnuplot via brew with the ‘–with-cairo’ flag: “brew reinstall gnuplot –with-cairo”. Cheers!

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    1. Thank you!

      In my work I need to provide the easiest possible installation for my undergraduate students. About half run mac os and half run windows.

      I hope to avoid taking the mac users down the path to homebrew or macports, but rather provide precompiled install packages.

      Do you have any experience making such install installation packages with Homebrew?

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      1. Unfortunately I do not. When I installed via Homebrew, I believe it tried to use the prebuilt binaries but failed and automatically installed from source. I think that the maintenance cost for keeping valid pre-built packages/binaries is high especially in the context of a cross platform app like these ones. I suppose it’s the price to pay for using good open-source software :). P.S. I saw discussions surrounding incorporating Maxima into Jupyter. I can’t wait for that (right now the installation process for incorporating Maxima in Jupyter is not so trivial). Cheers!

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  4. Thanks for this site. I installed wxmaxima following your instructions and all run ok. I need use the library qinf (quantum information tools). I downloaded the library, the problem is where I copy the mac, lisp files in a Windows installation. Thanks for your help.

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    1. Here’s what I found in the readme.md at git
      Installation
      To use this package, copy all of the files in the ./src/ directory to your .maxima/ directory, or other directory in Maxima’s search path. For unix/linux, there is a script ./install.sh that does this for you.

      Using qinf
      At the Maxima prompt give the following command.

      load(“qinf.mac”);

      If you aren’t sure about the Maxima search path, you could replace this last load command with the menus in wxMaxima:
      File–>Load Package
      and select qinf.mac from the directory you saved it to.

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  5. Hello! Thanks for putting together the install instructions.

    Will the “experimental installation guide for macOS, January 24, 2020 update” also work for the 10.11.6 OS X El Capitan?

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  6. Just discovered this site and very sad to see archives going till July 2018 and no later (although i see users posting from 2020). I am a long time user of maxima (6 years and maybe more) and since this system is undeveloped always considering to migrate to Sage.

    Please tell me that maxima is still active…

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  7. oh yossi, what a difficult question to answer!

    I still use maxima (with wxMaxima) in one of the undergraduate courses I teach each year. While I was learning maxima and developing what I needed for my teaching, I posted a lot of things here. The last big development I needed was a more robust inverse Laplace transform, which was back in 2018. Since then, I’ve been referring students to this site without adding much of my own.

    One source of recurring frustration is that because my students are about 50% windows and 50% macOS, I need to use software that is fairly agnostic about the OS it installs on. As an example, I use RStudio in some of my stats classes and the experience is comparable across operating systems. For maxima, on the other hand, each year brings with it a new wrinkle for macOS installation. You’ll see a hasty Jan. 2020 addition to the “my macOS installation” page that lives on this site necessitated by a macOS system update.

    Switching to Sage — which I think I remember is native to macOS — isn’t a better option for me because there the installation on windows is the complicated.

    Thanks for watching!

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    1. Hi,

      I am using Maxima several years by now which makes it difficult to migrate to other CAS (like Sage).

      For beginners that want to avoid Sage installation (it was complicated, I don’t know how it evolved these days) there is Sage online.

      Anyway, I am looking for a good code (in Maxima) for solving linear equations over finite fields.

      Are the any?

      Thank you for reviving this Blog!

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  8. Used your instructions to install Maxima/WxMaxima on Mac OS 10.14.6. Starts up as you describe. Tested it with various symbolic math and graphics commands, works fine. However: startup is very slow, in some cases up to 10 minutes, and one cannot have an already open terminal window – I got errors. Two questions: 1. Do you know why startup is so slow? 2. How can I see what the terminal window is executing – it usually doesn’t open a window on startup, just a terminal process. Perhaps there is an alternate way to run Maxima in the terminal window as opposed to right clicking it from the Applications folder? Many Thanks! (and thanks for your wonderful posts/tutorials on Maxima symbolic maths usage issues) SL

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    1. Thanks SL. I don’t know what to think about the persistent slow startups. I haven’t heard anything about that from my students who use macOS. I’ll check and reply further if I learn anything about that.

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  10. Thank you for creating this site. I have been simulating some dynamical systems. I find some extremely useful utilities here and from analysing them I’m inspired about how to utilize the functionality of maxima in the way I never thought was possible.

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