> This workflow/tutorial is designed to remedy these three problems. The tool chosen - Maxima - is available for free, as is all its supporting software ...<p>Hey, knock yourself out, but Sage (<a href="http://www.sagemath.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sagemath.org/</a>) integrates, and improved on, Maxima, and represents a much more advanced free tool for symbolic mathematics.<p>Also, there's Sympy (<a href="http://sympy.org/en/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://sympy.org/en/index.html</a>), a Python library that does symbolic mathematics and would be a much better and simpler way for you to explain and demonstrate symbolic mathematics in a tutorial. Let's use Sympy to solve a quadratic:<p><pre><code> from sympy import *
var('x a b c')
sol = solve(a * x**2 + b * x + c,x)
print(sol)
print(latex(sol))
</code></pre>
Output:<p><pre><code> [(-b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a), -(b + (-4*a*c + b**2)**(1/2))/(2*a)]
</code></pre>
Rendered Latex: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Z4yKvkq.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Z4yKvkq.png</a>