numerics in mathematica and alternatives

[sean kim]

Hello Group.

I have a system of 23 ODE's and 47 parameters. I, myself being a grad student in Bio, i'm having some problems with solving it numerically in Mathematica. and as such, i was looking for the alternatives to the mathematica system.

Good thing about mathemtica, aside the symbolics, is that it has nice graphics primitives and other scripting abilities to make analysis of such system as mine a bit easier. (flow controls funtional prgramming, built in graphics etc etc )

i'm wondering if there is a freeware package that uses NR that is easy to use and designed for large ODE systems?

things i'm looking for are easy to use graphics, list or array generation and operation, stability and accuracy of the solutions.

if this isn't possible, then i would settle for software that will solve such large ODE systems over large parameter space and output a list of values for all the variables.

if need be, I can learn Fortran or C just enough to do the analysis of such ODE systems.

any suggestions?

thanks in advance.

sean