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Whats the difference between Octave and Maxima?

silentriver

Joined
4/26/07
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I am very new Quant and planned to study it on my own. Lack of $$$ for a formal education.

Recently on my Linux box, I found two mathematical program called Octave and Maxima. I do not understand the difference between the two application. Furthermore, the web sites that I visited does not make any sense to me. :-( Anyone can help?
 
silentriver said:
I am very new Quant and planned to study it on my own. Lack of $$$ for a formal education.

Recently on my Linux box, I found two mathematical program called Octave and Maxima. I do not understand the difference between the two application. Furthermore, the web sites that I visited does not make any sense to me. :-( Anyone can help?
Click to expand...


In simplistic terms, Octave is for numerical computing and Maxima is for symbolic mathematics.
You need Octave.

In slightly less simplistic terms:
Matlab is a superb numerical computing environment.
Matlab has been extended with various Toolboxes to do symbolic mathematics and many other goodies.
Octave is a free Matlab clone.

Maxima is based on the original DOE-MACSYMA code developed at MIT.
It is a symbolic mathematics system.
Mathematica and Maple are clones of the original DOE-MACSYMA. They have been extended too and can do everything that Octave and Matlab can do. However, their primary focus and the focus of their user community is symbolic mathematics.

If you are a mathematician, choose Mathematica/Maple/Maxima
If your are interested in computational finance, Matlab and Octave seem to be suitable.
I am studying ( purely for amusement ! ) elementary quant with the aid of Matlab, Octave, Kevin Shepherds Matlab for MFE notes, and Brandimarte's book.

Disclaimer:
I am a newbie and a mere hobbyist in computational finance .:tiphat:
Trust my statements at your peril.
 
Maxima can be useful, too. I was recently trying to verify the results of several downloadable options calculators; the fact that no two of them gave the same values for the greeks made me suspicious of the lot. (I just wanted one that worked... The problem was to know which one that was. And I didn't want to spend time implementing, which was why I went looking for downloads in the first place.)

My way out? Type the closed form solution to Black-Scholes-Merton into Maxima, compute the derivatives *symbolically*, and then evaluate them for some test cases to figure out which calculator was right.
 
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