Math & STEM Tools

GeoGebra, Desmos, Manim, SageMath, Mathematica — interactive math for teaching.

Math teachers have the best free tools in education. GeoGebra and Desmos alone replace ~$1,000 of graphing calculators per student. For science simulations see Science Simulations; for younger learners see Math for Kids; for code-classroom hardware see STEM Hardware (micro:bit) and Microcontroller Platforms.

Interactive math (the dominant FOSS picks)

★ ★ GeoGebra — free (closed source nowadays, with FOSS classic versions still around); geometry, algebra, calculus, statistics, 3D, AR — one tool, K-12 through undergrad. Web + desktop
- iOS + Android. GeoGebra Classroom for teacher dashboards.
★ ★ Desmos — free; the graphing calculator the entire English-speaking education world defaulted to. Desmos Classroom for teacher activities; Desmos Geometry, Desmos 3D shipped 2024. Was acquired by Amplify in 2022 — graphing calc + activities remain free.
fxSolver, Symbolab — paid + free; step-by-step solvers; Symbolab is owned by Course Hero.
Photomath — paid + free; phone-camera math; acquired by Google 2022.

★ SageMath — GPL; full open-source CAS; bundles SymPy, NumPy, Maxima, GAP, R; the FOSS equivalent of Mathematica + MATLAB combined. Web (CoCalc), desktop, Docker.
- https://github.com/sagemath/sage
★ SymPy — BSD; pure-Python CAS; embed in Jupyter.
Maxima — GPL; oldest open-source CAS (Macsyma lineage).
GAP, Pari/GP — specialised group theory / number theory.
Octave — GPL; MATLAB-compatible numerical.
Scilab — GPL; MATLAB-compatible numerical.
R + tidyverse — see data exploration.
Julia — MIT; fast scientific computing; Pluto.jl notebooks for teaching.

Wolfram Mathematica — paid; site-licence at most universities; Wolfram Alpha is free.
MATLAB + Simulink — paid; engineering-school standard; site-licences common.
Maple (Maplesoft) — paid; symbolic + numeric; popular in Canadian / EU universities.
Wolfram Cloud / Wolfram Notebooks — paid + free tier.

★ KaTeX — MIT; fast TeX rendering; the default for static docs sites.
- https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX
MathJax — Apache 2.0; broader TeX coverage; slower; the academic default.
- https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax
Temml — convert TeX to MathML; modern fallback.
MathLive — accessible math input UI; pairs with KaTeX.
MyST-Markdown / Quarto — Markdown + math + interactive figures for academic publishing.

★ Manim — MIT; the original "3Blue1Brown" engine; Python; cinematic math animations.
- https://github.com/3b1b/manim
★ Manim Community Edition (manimce) — MIT; the active community fork; better docs, weekly releases. The one most learners use today.
- https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim
Motion Canvas — MIT; TypeScript-based programmatic animation; a "Manim for the web."
- https://github.com/motion-canvas/motion-canvas
p5.js — LGPL; Processing for the web; the default creative-coding tool in classrooms.
D3.js — see charts.
Observable / Observable Notebooks — interactive notebooks for math / data viz.

See Notebooks — Jupyter / JupyterLab / nbgrader (graded notebooks), Pluto.jl (Julia), Colab (free Google).