What is MAXIMA?
MAXIMA is a reimplementation in Common Lisp of MACSYMA, the oldest computer algebra system. MAXIMA provides both symbolic computation and high-precision integer and floating-point arithmetic. MACSYMA was originally developed starting about 1968 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using the MACLISP dialect of the Lisp programming language. The name stood for Project MAC’s SYmbolic MAnipulation System, and MAC stands for Man and Computer, or for Machine Aided Cognition. Project MAC later became the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, certainly one of the premier institutions in the field. In the early 1980s, Macsyma was reimplemented in the Franz Lisp dialect by Richard Fateman’s research group at the University of California at Berkeley, enabling it to be run on DEC VAX computers running Berkeley UNIX, where it was called Vaxima. It was also ported by a U.S. Department of Energy-supported effort at MIT, to NIL, another Lisp dialect. The U.S. DOE version was further developed
