Preferred (symbolic) computer algebra system

[Alain De Vos]

What is your preferred (symbolic) computer algebra system and why.

 

[astyle]

Where's math/octave?

I kind of like Maxima, it's not that different from Mathematica. But I nearly took a class where Octave Levenspiel (one of the Octave's authors) himself was the instructor, but it conflicted with another class I had to take at the time.

 

[hruodr]

I only played with maxima and reduce. There are also android versions for them, the one for reduce much more lightweight. For what do you need a computer algebra system?
.
astyle, octave is not a CAS system, it is only for numeric calculations, like Matlab.

 

[Alain De Vos]

For the full information octave has a symbolic package that is a wrapper around sympy.
(but it requires an older version of sympy, so i might not work)