New toy!
After discussing the options with one of my co-workers, I installed SciPy and all its associated dependencies, because it was free and had more than enough computational power to do what I wanted to play with. I don't know enough about any of the computer-math programs to make a case for work buying me one of the very expensive programs, and I couldn't rationalize buying such a program for myself at home to play with, so open source it is.
My first "project", such as it was, was both somewhat practical and relevant to my work, while still being easy enough for a first project: calculating how long it takes for the flow to reach steady state in a series of tanks with a pump at one end (step change input) and gravity flow all the way through.
