Have You Tried wxMaxima for Tensor Manipulation in General Relativity?

[CFDFEAGURU]

Hello all,

I came across this free math program, wxMaxima, in a General Relativity textbook. I downloaded it and got it working (very simple to do) and I read some of the history of its development in the DOE (Department of Energy).

It appears to very good at tensor manipulation.

Has anyone ever used this program? If so what are your thoughts?

Thanks
Matt

 

[azerwekh]

Hi Matt,

I have used Maxima (wxmaxima is the name of a frontend to Maxima) for some years now, for general symbolic manipulation such as, diagonalization of symbolic matrices, taylor expansions of complicated exprasions, solving differential equations and so on.

I'm not a specialist on General Relativity (I'm a particles physicist) but I have played a little bit with the tensor capabilities of Maxima. I have used it for obtaining geometrical objects (Ricci tensor, christoffell symbols, scalar curvature, etc...) from a given metric (for example, Rundall-Sundrum). In a pedagogical activity I used it in order to obtain Friedman equations from FRW metric. I have shown Maxima to my firends specialis in GR and they found Maxima quite useful in this field

In general I think it is a very complete and useful CAS. Of course, it still needs some work on it but there is a very active community of developers. I would like to see more physicist using it and perhaps contributing to its development.

Alfonso