Mathematica,
from Wolfram
Research, is the 'Photoshop' of the computational
world. Firmly established as the tool of choice for
mathematicians and physicists, it is designed to bring
the power of mathematics to all of the technical professions.
It is increasingly being adopted in the engineering
field because of the application's ability to carry
out symbolic and numeric calculations along with report
generation and document production. Mathematica's technical
documentation system lets you produce a professional
looking paper or presentation containing images, calculations
and formulas, without hopping back and forth between
programs. One single Mathematica document (called a
notebook) can be used for creating a printed document,
presentation or a hypertext document for publication
on a company intranet or the World Wide Web.
Wolfram bills Mathematica as "the world's only
fully integrated technical computing system, combining
interactive calculation (both numeric and symbolic),
visualization tools (2D and 3D graphics), and a complete
programming environment."
Mathematica is platform independent and there are versions
for a whole variety of systems including; Mac OS, Windows
95/98/NT, Linux, Sun OS/Solaris and various other variants
of UNIX. Its notebook format is platform independent,
so notebook documents created on one platform can be
easily shared with others running Mathematica on a different
system.
According to Wolfram literature, Mathematica 4 is substantially
faster than the previous version for large repetitive
operations. Also due to a new "packed array"
technology, memory consumption of numerical arrays is
much less. (See graphs below.)
The following calculations assume that m is
a 500 X 500 array of random real numbers. Shorter bars
are better
The graphs below show the memory usage for creating
a vector of 100,000 random numbers. Shorter bars are
better
Key features in Mathematica
4 include:
Extensive enhancements in speed and efficiency
Direct import and export from over 20 standard
data, graphics, and sound file formats
Spell checking and hyphenation in the notebook
interface
Extended HTML and TeX output capabilities
Extended range and improved functions for
data analysis
Support for handling computations in specified
algebraic domains
Network license management availability on
all platforms
Over 100 new or enhanced Mathematica functions
Mathematica 4 is completely compatible with previous
versions of Mathematica.
Wolfram provides a free
notebook reader that enables others without
Mathematica the ability to read and print from
notebook files.
Wolfram has been working with an independent committee
to add math capabilities to HTML so that mathematical
notation can be displayed as HTML rather than GIFs.
This has resulted in the MathML standards. The ability
to save expressions in MathML is built into version
4 of Mathematica.
You are also able to link special Mathematica kernels
to web
pages, giving the pages calculating ability.
Wolfram is also working on the gigaNumerics Project
(some of which is evident in version 4), which will
incorporate into Mathematica the ability to handle numeric
data sets of gigabyte size efficiently and quickly,
without sacrificing small data set agility.
Mathematica can be used as an interactive
calculation tool and as a high-level programming
language. Some general uses include the following:
as an interactive numerical and symbolic calculator
as a visualization and sound generation system
for functions and data
as a high-level programming language in which
you can create programs, large and small
as a modeling, simulation, and data analysis
environment
as a system for representing knowledge in
mathematical and technical fields
as a control language for external programs
and processes
as a high-level shell for file, text, and
data manipulation
as a tool for creating interactive documents
mixing text, animated graphics, and active formulas
as a technical publishing tool for both traditional
print and on the web
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Mathematica,
from 
