Symbolic math software on the Nevis Linux cluster

To answer the question that led you here: No, at present we do not have Mathematica at Nevis; nor do we have Matlab or Maple. The licenses for these packages cost money, and must be regularly renewed. The Columbia site licenses reduce, but do not replace, these license fees.

Instead, the cluster offers the open-source alternatives to these mathematics packages:

  • Maxima is a symbolic math package that's an alternative to Mathematica or Maple.

  • Octave is a numerical computation package that can serve as a replacement for Matlab.

  • R is the open-source equivalent to the statistics environment S-plus.

These packages are installed on every user system of the Nevis Linux cluster.

You might want to consider SageMath, a Python-based wrapper around several public-domain symbolic math packages including the ones listed above. It's available via our notebook server at

If you require one of the commercial packages for your work, it would have to be handled on an individual basis; we'd have to purchase a license for a particular computer on which you work for a specified interval of time. As an alternative, these packages are available at the campus computer lab and on the CUNIX server.

Topic revision: r6 - 2017-02-23 - WilliamSeligman
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