Reduce, Axiom and Macsyma or the inferior "Maxima" anyway are still around and open source. Reduce and Axiom seem to have lost all open source momentum, which i

Reduce, Axiom and Macsyma or the inferior "Maxima" anyway are still around and open source. Reduce and Axiom seem to have lost all open source momentum, which is a bloody shame as they were extremely interesting and powerful tools. I used Reduce in my own research, and remember finding it more powerful than contemporary Maple or Mathematica on certain classes of integrals. I guess there are a number of others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_software_for_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_software_f... One missing from this list is Yacas, which was very impressive as it was basically a one man project written in the same way Wolfram wrote his thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacas Three that should not be forgotten: 1) Maple predated Mathematica, and was, as I recall easier to use. I think it survives as a standalone and as a Matlab package. It would be an interesting HBS case study why Maple doesn't have Wolfram's success or brand recognition. Wolfram is a weird guy (as others point out), but somehow was more successful than the humble Canadians. 2) Mathcad: in the early 90s, a lot of people used this instead of Mathematica or Maple because it was cheaper and it had a nice jupyter notebook like UI that didn't require you to learn a whole language 3) Derive: this one I really miss (it also predated Mathematica). It had a UI which was vastly better than Mathcad or any of Mathematica's later attempts at efficiency. You could crank out integrals or perturbation series on miniscule hardware; I ran it on my 186 HP100LX. And I believe it was internally based on a lisp engine, which gave lie to Wolfram's engineering choice that C/C++ was needed to make a tight CAS. This lives on somehow in TI calculators, but I'd actually consider buying a tablet or "smart phone" if there was a version of it for modern hardware. FWIIW Wolfram is again worth a HBS study, as they're really the only first generation of "AI" company that survived and thrived. Computer algebra systems were considered AI back in the day, and the more general expert system shells were considered a viable path to strong AI (hint; it didn't work out) in the same way that "Deep Learning" is now (hint: it probably won't either).