I like Mathematica quite a bit (the Front End/Kernel makes a lot of sense), but I don't really like Wolfram after he left Physics. The way he downplays Reduce, Macsyma (Maxima), the pioneering work that was Veltman's Schoonschip and then FORM... He doesn't even mention the folks at Maple. Computer Algebra was a well established field way before Mathematica appeared in 1988[1]. He's smart and very good at selling his product, that's fine, and for a long time his company has had the resources to hire a lot of good people and you can tell/take advantage of it when using Mathematica. But honestly, I think we could do without.<p>Personally, I find more interesting David R. Stoutmeyer, who made the first CAS for microcomputers in the late 70s, muMath for CP/M, and then the tiny PICOMATH-80 for the TRS-80. He went on to write Derive, that was much loved in the early 90s, because it was very good and you could afford it while Mathematica has always been expensive and for some years (until version 2.2 really) you needed either a souped- up Macintosh or a workstation to run it. Then Texas Instruments hired him in order to develop the Derive-based TI-92/89 (Derive was written in Lisp, its version for those in C BTW) and ended up buying Soft Warehouse and shutting Derive for good... which is just sad and nobody cares.<p>I'd like to ask for some love for Reduce, now open sourced and hosted at SourceForge -not cool any more, but it lives there-. It still makes a few calculations easier than Mathematica.<p>[1] See for instance this very interesting review of the early Mathematica: <a href="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/mma.review.pdf</a>