Mathematica Version 6

Abstract

MATHEMATICA VERSION 6 http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/index.html Contact: Wolfram Research, Inc. 100 Trade Center Drive Champaign, IL 61820-7237 217-398-0700 $1,095 Academic price ($139.95 Student version) Most anyone with a long professional career related to mathematics would agree that is the software package that has had the most overall impact on the discipline of mathematics over the last decade. Since its first release in 1988, has pretty much defined how computing systems interact in the discipline of mathematics. Wolfram Research indicates that this newest version of (Version 6) is in many ways a new and revolutionary product, extending well beyond a typical software upgrade. As a long-time user of at the university level, I would agree. I found Version 6 to be quite impressive, and another significant step forward in technical computing for mathematics. This latest version includes many new features, particularly related to the dynamic interactivity of the package, with various supporting features to this interactivity, such as more adaptive data visualization strategies, enhanced data integration formats, load on demand curated data, symbolic interface construction, automated creation of interfaces, and various unifications of the program's graphics, text flowing, and input strategies. The program continues to run on a large variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and numerous other systems. The Macintosh Version was reviewed here. The core of the program is still its symbolic processing language, which allows users to enter mathematical expressions and undertake extensive manipulation of those expressions. This language includes a wide range of grammatical features, including symbolic expressions, lists, functional operations, pattern matching, rules/transformations, definitions/assignments, logical tests, modularity, procedural programming, and various string manipulations. Mathematical functions are extensive as well, and include just about any common function that one might see in a mathematics textbook. A wide variety of input and output formats is also available, including numeric, graphical, text, image, and audio formats. What is probably best known for historically is the interactivity of the user with the program, operating in what are called Mathematica Sessions. This aspect of is well retained (and expanded) in Version 6, to allow the user a great deal of user control with the program as well the capability to help visualize data, often providing a very aesthetic look at the data output. Finally, everything continues to be done within what are called Mathematica Sessions that are essentially on-screen notebooks, making the program look and operate somewhat like a word processing program and allowing multiple interactive windows. See Figure below. The well-integrated and extensive features continue to make one of the most popular and successful mathematics-related programs ever developed. As Wolfram Research advertises, Version 6 of the program has some significant innovations. The primary and most impressive innovation is the dynamic interactivity of the program, which expands its previous interactivity by use of strategies such as a command that creates dynamic interfaces for a single line of input. There is also a much more extensive and uniform range of control features, such as slider boxes, menus, buttons, etc. The manipulate command and the related control features essentially allow a user the ability to immediately make any computation or intermediate step in a sequence of mathematical analyses relatively interactive. Thus, it helps mathematicians (or related professionals) to fully explore each step in their analysis, to more fully understand the evolving sequence of mathematical steps. …