This would belong really to lyx-devel, but I'm not used to use that
mailing list...
I just found a _great_ symbolic mathematics program called Maxima. It's
GNU version of Macsyma, which in turn is over 30 years old software. But
it's great, comparable to Mathematica (well, I have never really used
Mathematica but at least a lot better than Derive). The user interface
isn't just that nice after all.
Now, why not integrate[1] Maxima and maybe Octave too to LyX? Imagine
writing an equation in LyX, and selecting "solve" from Math menu and your
equation would be solved?
In any case, some automatic way to transfer data between
Maxima<->Octave<->Scilab<->LyX would be great. It's not nice to copy all
the numbers by hand between Scilab and LyX, nor formulas between Maxima
and LyX.
I'm not proposing this do be done immediately, there are more important
things to do now (bug fixes and a free GUI, Lesstif would be nice), but
maybe sometime in future.
We would then have a program superior to Mathematica...
[1]Not necessary in the same binary but similarly like DDD is integrated
with GDB and Ghostscript with Ghostview/GV.
