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Computers play several roles in modern mathematics. The most ubiquitous, of course, is the sending of email. A close second, however, is the preparation of documents. The tool of choice among mathematicians is TeX, the language-and-program created by Donald Knuth. Here are some sites where you can find out more about TeX and related products.
One of the weaknesses of TeX on the UNIX systems that are commonly used in mathematics departments is the lack of an integrated interface to auxiliary tools like editors, previewers, and printing programs. I've written a little program that serves as a graphical control center for TeX. The program is written in Tcl (version 7.4) with the Tk windowing toolkit (version 4.0). It has not been tested with newer versions of the languages. In any event, the program is called TeXL, and you're welcome to try it.
Increasingly, mathematicians are using computers in their research and in their teaching. For example, David Grant and I wrote and used The Arithmetic of Global Fields to study some arithmetic properties of curves. This package consists of a library of C functions to carry out arbitrary precision computations with integers and with polynomials over finite fields. The library is available under the terms of the GNU Public License.
There are now several software packages on the market that make it easier to do mathematics on a computer. Here are some sites where you can learn about these software packages.
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