Mathematical Software

Software skills are ever more important for computation, experimentation, illustration, and communication.  Here is list of high quality software in use at UNC Asheville.

TeX

The universal software of choice for mathematicians who want to create beautifully typeset documents.  TeX, and it's widely used extension LaTeX, are supported by the American Mathematical Society and are freely available through an open source license.  The TeX User Group provides easily installed download:

• MikTeX - for PC users
• MacTeX - for Mac users

Mathematica

An extremely powerful general purpose system for symbolic, graphic, and numeric exploration.  UNC Asheville has a generous license allowing us to install Mathematica on computers campus wide and allowing faculty and students to install it on their home computer.   Students and faculty can download it directly from Wolfram Research by following the appropriate link below.

• Faculty
• Students

Professor McClure has more informattion, including information on getting started, on his Mathematica webpage.

Minitab

Minitab is used in our introductory statistics classes.  In addition to the installations in the statistics classrooms, Minitab may be installed on faculty and student personal computers via a University site license.  You can obtain the installation media through the circulation desk in Ramsey Library.

SAS

SAS is very powerful statistical software widely used throughout the business world.  SAS is available to UNC Asheville faculty and students via a University site license.  You can obtain the installation media through the circulation desk in Ramsey Library.

GeoGebra

A very nice interactive tool for Geometric exploration.  Generates nice images for inclusion into LaTeX.  Freely available at GeoGebra.org.

Matlab

Matlab is the numerical environment of choice for engineers and applied mathematicians.  It is not free and UNC Asheville does not have a site license for it.  The student version is only $100 and well worth the price for someone going on in applied mathematics.  You can purchase the student verion from MathWorks.

While Matlab is not free, there is always...

Octave

Octave is an open source Matlab clone.  As such, a student who is taking a course using Matlab might be able to get by using Octave for free, rather than purchasing Matlab.  Octave has a simple text based interface implementing much of the core language of Matlab and can create basic graphics.  It lacks many of the bells and whistles of Matlab, however. Octave can be freely downloaded from their GNU webpage.