Maxima and Yacas
Maxima
From the Maxima web page:
"Maxima is a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, and sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors. Maxima yields high precision numeric results by using exact fractions, arbitrary precision integers, and arbitrarily precision floating point numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions.
Maxima is a descendant of Macsyma, the legendary computer algebra system developed in the late 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is the only system based on that effort still publicly available and with an active user community, thanks to its open source nature. Macsyma was revolutionary in its day, and many later systems, such as Maple and Mathematica, were inspired by it.
The Maxima branch of Macsyma was maintained by William Schelter from 1982 until he passed away in 2001. In 1998 he obtained permission to release the source code under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It was his efforts and skill which have made the survival of Maxima possible, and we are very grateful to him for volunteering his time and expert knowledge to keep the original DOE Macsyma code alive and well. Since his passing a group of users and developers has formed to bring Maxima to a wider audience."
There are various interfaces to Maxima for Unix and Windows. The beautiful IMaxima interface uses LaTeX for formula display.
Euler is just another way to access Maxima with the additional benefit of fast numerical computation.
Yacas
For backward compatibility, Yacas is still supported in Euler, however it is no longer recommended.
From the Yacas web page:
"YACAS is an easy to use, general purpose Computer Algebra System, a program for symbolic manipulation of mathematical expressions. It uses its own programming language designed for symbolic as well as arbitrary-precision numerical computations. The system has a library of scripts that implement many of the symbolic algebra operations; new algorithms can be easily added to the library. YACAS comes with extensive documentation (hundreds of pages) covering the scripting language, the functionality that is already implemented in the system, and the algorithms we used. "
Euler uses a Yacas DLL, built for Windows. The systems has benefits over Maxima, but in general lacks functionality found in Maxima.