Maxima is a descendant of DOE Macsyma, which had its origins in the
late 1960s at MIT. It is the only system based on that effort still
publicly available and with an active user community, thanks to its
open source nature. Macsyma was the first of a new breed of computer
algebra systems, leading the way for programs such as Maple and
Mathematica. Maxima itself is reasonably feature complete at this
stage, with abilities such as symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and
an ODE solver, but there is a lot of work yet to be done in terms of
bug fixing, cleanup, and documentation.
WWW: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
Submitted by rich@cannings.org with minor tweaks by me
