When you have an account you'll be able to view lots of published calculations on http://www.sagenb.org/pub/. If you see the error "It looks like jsMath failed to set up properly (error code -7). I will try to keep going, but it could get ugly.", you haven't installed the TeX fonts which help jsMath render beautiful mathematics. To get the nice TeX display with jsMath, please download a set of fonts from here: http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/download/jsMath-fonts.html.
This free open source resource offers you the power of a full symbolic maths package like Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Magma (which cost $1000 - $2000). The browser text interface makes it easy to copy and paste into your Excel worksheets. I barely scratch the surface in terms of its power but I'll be returning to solve the following types of problem:
sage: x, b, c = var('x b c')
sage: solve([x^2 + b*x + c == 0],x)
[x == (-sqrt(b^2 - 4*c) - b)/2, x == (sqrt(b^2 - 4*c) - b)/2]
sage: x, y = var('x, y')
sage: solve([x+y==6, x-y==4], x, y)
[[x == 5, y == 1]]
Differentiation, Integration, etc.
Sage knows how to differentiate and integrate many functions. For
example, to differentiate sin(u) with
respect to u, do the following:
sage: u = var('u')
sage: diff(sin(u), u)
cos(u)
To compute the fourth derivative of
sin(x2):
sage: diff(sin(x^2), x, 4)
16*x^4*sin(x^2) - 12*sin(x^2) - 48*x^2*cos(x^2)
To compute the partial derivatives of
x2 +
17y2 with respect to x and
y, respectively:
sage: x, y = var('x,y')
sage: f = x^2 + 17*y^2
sage: f.diff(x)
2*x
sage: f.diff(y)
34*y
Solving Differential Equations
You can use
Sage to investigate ordinary differential equations.
To solve the equation
x'+
x-1=0:
sage: t = var('t') # define a variable t
sage: x = function('x',t) # define x to be a function of that variable
sage: DE = lambda y: diff(y,t) + y - 1
sage: desolve(DE(x(t)), [x,t])
'%e^-t*(%e^t+%c)'
This uses
Sage's interface to Maxima [
Max], and so its output may be
a bit different from other
Sage output. In this case, this says that
the general solution to the differential equation is
x(t) =
e–t(
et
+
c).
You can compute Laplace transforms also; the Laplace transform of
t2et
- sin(t) is computed as follows:
sage: s = var("s")
sage: t = var("t")
sage: f = t^2*exp(t) - sin(t)
sage: f.laplace(t,s)
2/(s - 1)^3 - 1/(s^2 + 1)
Three-Dimensional Plots
Sage produces three-dimensional plots using an open source package
called [Jmol]. E.g. a twisted torus:
sage: u, v = var('u,v')
sage: fx = (3+sin(v)+cos(u))*cos(2*v)
sage: fy = (3+sin(v)+cos(u))*sin(2*v)
sage: fz = sin(u)+2*cos(v)
sage: parametric_plot3d([fx, fy, fz], (u, 0, 2*pi), (v, 0, 2*pi),
... frame=False, color="red")