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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 Overview of Mathematica at the Wolfram Research web site for a very neat and impressive tour of the amazing power of the current Version 7 of Mathematica.
My only criticism of Mathematica might be the syntax of its language, which reads like a blend of LISP, Pascal and Perl. The syntax is strict and delicate and you can write code that has a traditional procedural look or code which is functional and terse. Skilled Mathematica coders tend to produce code that is so concise and compact that reading it is like an IQ test. If you don't believe me, have a look at this random sample I picked:
Recreational maths with Mathematica
Other samples my own Mathematica code can be found in these pages: