|
Mathematica | |
|
||
|
Home « Hobbies « Mathematica | |
 The Mathematica Book by Stephen Wolfram |
In my own words, Mathematica is an application for performing numeric and symbolic mathematics, it is extensible, programmable and generalised. I consider Mathematica to be one of the most impressive feats of software development I have ever seen, and I'm pleased to see that I'm not the only person who feels that way. Mathematica has a "purity" about that could only result from a collaboration of skilled professional mathematicians and software engineers. I feel that in a sense the "purity" of mathematics itself has been captured in the software.
Mathematica 1.0 was released in 1988 but I did not know of its existence until early 1992 when I found the version 2.0 manual sitting in a bookshelf in the developer's department of a company where I was working. They didn't have the software, just the manual. I started reading in the manual about this amazing piece of software that could perform calculations with unlimited precision, draw 2-D and 3-D graphs, solve equations, simplify, expand, factor, invert, and so on seemingly without limit. Some of the samples in the manual left my jaw hanging in disbelief that such things were possible. This was clearly a piece of software unlike any I had seen before, and I could instantly see how it could have an incredible impact upon research and teaching. I kept thinking "if only such a thing was available when I was in school".
See the Tour of Mathematica at the Wolfram Research web site for a very neat and impressive tour of the amazing power of the current Version 4 of Mathematica.
As a programmer, I'm quite impressed by the programming language built-in to Mathematica, which seems to me like a blend of LISP and C/Pascal. It's quite a challenge to learn to write good Mathematica programs, even for an experienced programmer. The syntax is exacting and delicate and there are usually multiple ways of coding the same solution. Programmers with a C style background will tend to write Mathematica programs that have a lot of procedural code in them (do-while and for loops, etc), but the experts can write functional code that is so elegant and terse that understanding their programs is like an IQ test (almost as bad as reading PERL). Have a look at this simple example:
Recreational maths with Mathematica
Other samples my own Mathematica code can be found in these pages: