Math Programs

[Dillinger4]

I just finished reading this book titled:
The man who loved only numbers.
which was about Paul Erdos one of the
greatest Mathematicians of our time.. great book

well anyway i was reading a article on math
programs and they were talking about
Stephen Wolfram who obtained his Phd in
theoretical physics from Caltech at the age
of 20. But any way he has a product out
there from his company Wolfram Research
called Mathematica. Has anyone ever heard
of it or used it??????


It sounds quite interesting....

You can program in Mathematica in a
C like procedural fashion, with the usual
assignments and loops and such, or you can
treat it as a rule based language like Prolog,
or as a string based language like Snobol--
pretty much everything you type in Mathematica
is a function a returns a value. You can
write programs that look something like Lisp.

Then there's the Java intergration. J/Link lets
Mathematica call Java functions and let's any Java program controll the Mathematica kernal.


Sounds pretty cool and too many features too list
but if any one has everheard of or used it reply
back..

Thanks

[Guv]

I have been told that Mathematica is the premier application of this type. The student edition costs about $100.00 to $150.00 (American), while the regular edition costs $800.00 to $1000.00, and is hard to find at a discount.

I have a student edition which I have never used. It is password protected and you have to prove that you are a student to get the password. I have never bothered to crack it or get some student to register it for me because I use MathCad7, which is a similar product and does everything I need.

I am told that Mathematica does more than mathCad7, so the following list of MathCad7 features might give you an idea of what Mathematica can do.

• It allows entry of almost any mathematical notation, including summations and integrals. It has optional floating toolbars with all the symbols not found on your keyboard: Greek letters, Pi, e, summation & integral symbols, root symbols, et cetera. The Pi & e symbols in a formula stand for the actual value. It takes one click to get a trig function or root symbol inserted and ready for entry of arguments.
  
• It very intelligently formats the math notation as you enter it.
  
• You can assign values to variables. Like a spreadsheet, changing a variable value causes recalculation of all formulae. Variable names can use upper/lower cased words like VB variables.
  
• It has evaluated every formula I ever entered, including summations and integrals.
  
• Remarks can be interspersed with formulae. It will print all the formulae, results, et cetera, resulting in a really fancy document, which would put many math texts to shame.
  
• It will solve simultaneous equations and invert matrices. I think it will solve for roots of polynomials, but I have never tried this.
  
• It will produce graphs of Y = Function(X) for any function you can enter. It will also produce draw surfaces with contour lines.
  
• It will produce tables if you describe a variable as having a range of values.
  
• It will do symbolic math. For example give it (A + B + C}^4 and it will show you all the terms in the expansion. I think it will simplify expressions, but I have not tried this capability.
  
• It probably has many more features which I have not yet used.
  
• It is user friendly. I have not read more than 5-10 pages of the 680 page manual, which was enough to allow me to use all the features I need.

[KamiKazeKiwi3]

Ive never heard of either program. But it sounds similar to what the Texas Instruments graphic calculaters do.

[Ahriman]

why didn't you just go to your favorit search engine, type in "Mathimatica" and go to the Mathimatica web site?

here is the addy
http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/

[Dillinger4]

Because i wanted to know if anyone here had used
Mathimatica and if so what did they think of it.

[fbokker]

I used mathematica during my studies quite a lot, my university had some licenses. It took some time to get used to it, because I was not a C programmer at that time.
mathematica was able to solve almost anything I tried: differential equations I would not even think about solving by my own brain, laplace&z-transformations, regressions, matrix calculations, .... . it plots any kind of plot you can imagine, density plots, pole plots, surface plots, statistical plots, ... you can plot 4D (use plot3D + time) without writing lots of code, pretty cool! the more I used it the more I was impressed. I have not the slightest clue, how they succeeded in programming all that stuff, but somehow they did!
the old mathematica 3.0 was not very stable under windows, had problems with the clipboard etc. (in case you ever read any bad things about it!) but the new mathematica 4.0 works pretty good.

oh, and the student version has a smaller manual, only 680 pages as mentioned before. there is a manual about double that size, but it is also on the Mathematica-CDROM itself, so you don't have to buy it.
there is an official website: www.wolfram.com, check it out!

[VirtuallyVB]

Right now, my urge to post is stronger than my urge to verify my comments, so take this with a grain of salt.

I used Mathematica (and/or Maple) in school, but I didn't like the interface. Since I used to sell MathCAD, I got a sweet deal on the latest version at that time (version 4.0) with all the extensions I was interested in. I know that MathCAD has some relation to Maple's engine, but I'm not sure if Mathematica does.

Until this month, I never needed to upgrade MathCAD version 4. In fact, if I write my own "regress" function that Guv has told me is able to perform polynomial curve fits (available in version 7), I still wouldn't need to upgrade.

I've received several offers to upgrade from version 4 of MathCAD, but having been the guy you call to upgrade (many software products), I don't see the need.

I'm not bashing MathSoft, but when they were marketing version 4, one selling point was the fact that you type equations as you normally do on paper (poo pooing the way we enter equations in every other programming language). Now they boast about integration with programming languages. I'm sure that's sweeter now, but DLL's work for me.

I think you will be satisfied with the most inexpensive and latest version of Mathematica, Maple, or MathCAD.