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I'm starting to become more functional in Mathcad, so I wanted to take the opportunity to look into known drawbacks, mathematically speaking, of CAS/computer math systems. For instance, one of the exercises we did in school involved "breaking" TI Derive by asking for the limit of a discontinuous function (at the point of discontinuity, of course). Another example would be p. 13 of this;

http://people.virginia.edu/~jcb6t/Mathcad/Johns_Tutorial_on_Everyday_Mathcad.pdf

So basically, I'm hoping folks will contribute known problems with these kinds of apps, whether from their experience with a particular package or generalized problems inherent in computer algebra.

I myself am most concerned with Mathcad and Mathematica, but it would be awesome for people to talk about CAS/computer math in general and drawbacks of various systems (matlab et al) in particular.

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    I removed the tag computability.2012-02-26
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    I imagine this question is a good candidate for being community wiki!2012-02-26
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    IMO the scope of this question is too general. Limitations of numerical packages such as MATLAB are way different than limitations of symbolic packages such as Mathematica.2012-02-26
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    @harald - Why thank you, kind sir! *blush*2012-02-26
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    Here's a relevant collection of issues: http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/99/calc_errors It's a bit old and some of the bugs mentioned may have been fixed by now, but nevertheless it never hurts to be cautious when doing mathematics with technology.2012-02-26
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    Mathoverflow: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/11517/2012-04-30

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