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George, the classic killer app for the PC was Lotus, which has been
displaced by MS Excel, which is part of the MSOffice suites. It has some
pretty poweful math and display functions, although it is not designed as a
"mathematics" package per se. Sun's OpenOffice and StarOffice are similar
packages designed to replace MSOffice. One is available online for free, the
other at reasonable cost and I think with a printed manual too. You'd have
to check online, these things change from time to time and Sun makes the
free version a bit harder to simply FIND on their web site. But, it is very
much still there.

In any case, there are scads of books on Excel ranging from the 100-page
intro at your local library, to the thousand page tomes. Your choice of
authors and complexity. And probably 95% of Excel, StarOffice, and
OpenOffice should be the same. They're not identical--but very similar.

I think IBM still packages Lotus with their office suite (the name eludes
me) and that's also available at very low prices.

I actually prefer an older version of Lotus or Excel, because the macro
programing was far far simpler than learning Visual Basic, which the current
versions of Excel and Office use for scripting.

Of course, you may want something like MathCad from MathSoft, or Wolfram's
Mathematica. Those are the classics designed for real math--as opposed to
accounting. You'd have to look at the feature lists to compare with whatever
you have in mind.

   

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