is the premier all-purpose mathematical software package. It integrates swift and accurate symbolic and numerical calculation, all-purpose graphics, and a powerful programming language. It has a sophisticated ``notebook interface'' which is great for documenting and displaying work. It can save individual graphics in any graphics format. Its functional programming language (as opposed to procedural) makes it possible to do complex programming using very short concise commands; it does, however, allow the use of basic procedural programming constructs like Do and For.

Matlab combines efficient computation, visualization and programming for linear-algebraic technical work and other mathematical areas. It is widely used in the Engineering department.

Maple is powerful analytical and mathematical software which does the same sorts of things that Mathematica does, with similar high quality. Maple's programming language procedural -- like C or Fortran or Basic -- although it has a few functional programming constructs.

(Interactive Data Language) excels at processing real-world data, especially graphics, and has a reasonably simple syntax, especially for those familiar with Fortran or C. IDL makes it as easy as possible to read in data from files of numerous scientific data formats. IDL is very popular at NASA, universities and research facilities, and especially at C.U. where it was originally developed and is very inexpensive for department/faculty/staff computers (see site license).