This page explains what PanAxiom stands for.

Axiom was originally developed by IBM under the name, ScratchPad II. It was named Axiom when IBM sold it to NAG. NAG later withdrew Axiom from the market and released it as free software. More on that history can be found on the Axiom homepage .

There are currently there forks, namely FriCAS, OpenAxiom and project by Tim Daly that keeps Axiom as a name.

Since at the moment when forks happened (that is in 2007) the algebraic functionalities of these three projects differed only in in small detail, it became customary to use "panAxiom" if one speaks about one of Axiom, FriCAS, and OpenAxiom without explicitly saying which system is meant. However as of 2022, FriCAS added a lot of new functionality (see FriCASAdvantages). Since only small part of new additions was ported to other systems when speaking about functionality it is better to be clear which version (fork) is in use. Also, apparently OpenAxiom developement stopped in 2015 and Tim Daly did no release in last several years. So FriCAS is the only "live" fork, that is the only fork with visible active development.

Probably the first appearance of the name "PanAxiom" appears in the following posting. http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2008-02/msg00038.html

Corresponding mailing lists can be found under PanAxiomCommunity.