Installation

We recommend to use Maxima with its graphical interface wxMaxima.

Linux:

Maxima is part of all popular linux distributions, but usually not installed. To install maxima and the graphical user interface wxmaxima, use the graphical package manager of your distribution. For Debian based distributions one can also use the following shell commands as root or with sudo:

apt-get install maxima wxmaxima

You have to make sure to install both maxima and wxmaxima.

Windows and MacOS:

Download the appropriate version of wxMaxima from the Maxima developers side and follow the install guide. The package contains both maxima and wxMaxima.

 

Collection of some plotting routines

For our examples we have created a collection of special plotting routines, making plots a bit nicer. You have to download the following file:

 

You have to copy this file in a special directory:

Linux/MacOS:

/home/USERNAME/.maxima

Windows:

c:\Users\USERNAME\maxima

 Then you can load it into a maxima notebook by the line

load(mathchem);

and executing it by pressing

       CTRL + RETURN

or   SHIFT + RETURN

 

First steps

Maxima is very extensive with its possibilities and functions. You can find several tutorials for beginners on the developers side .

Here are some things causing problems with simple solution:

• make sure each execution line ends with a semicolon ";" or a dollar sign "$" (dollar sign suppresses output)
• execution of a line is possible with "CTRL + RETURN" or "SHIFT + RETURN", press both buttons togehter. RETURN allone creates only a line break and can be used to make some structure.
• Variables are assigned with a colon ":" and function with combination of colon and equal sign ":="

 

Examples from our Mathematics script

We have created a version of our script "Mathemtik für Naturwissenschaftler" in combination with maxima:

Out of this script we have collected all examples into Maxima notebooks