Abstract
We propose a rigorous and practical methodology to evaluate the performance of symbolic manipulation program such as Mathematica, Maple, and Maxima. First, we demonstrate an inverse method to construct the benchmark problems of an initial value problems. The benchmark problems associated with the discrete version of the Chebyshev polynomials provide a rigorous and objective measure to evaluate the performance of symbolic manipulation programs. We compare three symbolic manipulation programs, which are Mathematica, Maple and Maxima, using this methodology. The computation time, the used memory and the perturbation terms are chosen for comparison parameters.
