open source mathematics software

does anybody use sage? Or there any other competing open source math softs?

Sage goes in all fields.
That's all you need to know.

I like Octave

I use R. But then again, everyone uses R. And a bit of Axiom, but the documentation is crap.
I'd check out Sage some time, but the download is fucking huge. What does it do, cure cancer?

USE FUCKING MATLAB

>>5

Not     fucking     open     source

Actual programs such as matlab and maple are Infinitely better than open shit and can be torrented easily.

Euler is pretty neat.
http://mathsrv.ku-eichstaett.de/MGF/homes/grothmann/euler/

Sage is good if you already know python and have the patience to learn all the new libaries it's stuck together.

If you don't know python, don't bother.

Actually, if you do know python, you can get almost the same effect as Sage by installing Scipy, NumPy and matlibplot, the rest of the Sage distro is some wrappers and linkers to other libraries so that you can (for instance) call matlab from sage if you're on *nix.  So if you're on windows, don't bother with Sage still.  Doubly so because their windows frontend, in a word, sucks.

Really, the only reason you'd use Sage is if you're on *nix and want to use it as glue to stick together code in a bunch of different languages.  For anything else it's not worth the download.