A Review of Symbolic Solvers

Solving equations and systems of equations symbolically is a key feature of every Computer Algebra System. This review examines the capabilities of the six best known general purpose systems to date in the area of general algebraic and transcendental equation solving. Areas explicitly not covered by this review are differential equations and numeric or polynomial system solving as special purpose systems exist for these kinds of problems. The aim is to provide a benchmark for comparing Computer Algebra Systems in a specific domain. We do not intend to give a rating of overall capabilities as for example in [9]. 1 The Contestants We compare six major Computer Algebra Systems. Axiom 2.0 [7], Derive 3.06 [1], Macsyma 420 [8], Maple V R4 [3], Mathematica 2.2 [10], MuPAD 1.2.9 [5] and Reduce 3.6 [6]. When available, we tried to use the latest shipping version of each system. 2 The Problem Set The following table presents the set of 80 problems that we used to evaluate the different solvers..