I teach lots of undergraduate students each year in Ordinary Differential Equations, Multivariable Calculus, Complex Variables, and Applied Statistics. Since 2016, I’ve been using the free open-source computer algebra system Maxima in the Multivariable Calculus and ODEs courses. To document the learning my students and I have done in Maxima, I created the blog TheMaximalist.org. That site serves our needs by giving us a place to write down the things we learn so that my students and I can refer back to them. Over the years, that site has become a little bit popular with other Maxima users around the world, getting about 30,000 visits a year.

Two things that bug me about Maxima:

  • There isn’t an obvious way for novices to install Maxima in macOS — that affects about half my students in each class. In fact over 30% of the traffic on TheMaximalist.org flows directly to my “My macOS Installation”.
  • Maxima has a small enough user base that my students don’t get much resume “wow” from their experience in that platform.

A few months ago a student mentioned that she was planning to spend some time learning Python before she started applying for jobs after graduation. We thought “let’s explore the idea of migrating our classroom work from Maxima to Python!”. This blog serves the purpose of a big paper weight to collect what we learn along the way.

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  1. a blogging platform that natively supports Jupyter notebooks in addition to other formats. ↩