Customer Reviews

Mathematica 4.2

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been using Mathematica for years and spent over forty hours playing around with this version just to update my knowledge for this review. And yet, I still feel that I know only a small fraction of what it can do. Without question, it is the most awesome piece of software that I have ever used. With decades of personal experience and having seen and used many different types of software, I am not easily impressed, so this is saying a great deal.
In the past few months, I have used it to:

* Verify the solutions to exam and homework problems in advanced calculus.
* Perform calculations for several research projects that I am working on.
* Perform computations in my attempts to solve problems that have appeared in journals.
* Perform statistical operations on data for an algorithms class.
* Examine and verify the contents of manuscripts that were received in my capacity as editor of Journal of Recreational Mathematics.

In fact, I find it so useful that it is now the second most widely used piece of software in my arsenal, trailing only word processors. By my rough computations, I now use it more than e-mail.
While I have never used Mathematica in the classroom, it is very easy to learn. I doubt if even a half hour of instruction would be necessary to get a user already familiar with the Windows environment to the point where they could use it. The user interface is clean, although it takes a few passes through some examples before you remember what the specific commands are. I tend to keep a small note of the primary commands near my workstation in case I forget.
The speed of the computations is amazing, there is clearly some very powerful algorithms under the hood of this bad boy. In trying some test computations, one million digits of PI were computed in a few minutes and I used a lot of unusual summations, all of which were completed in a matter of seconds. A great deal of time was wasted in my trying to see how complex and unusual I could make the summations before Mathematica finally had to struggle. Quite frankly, I failed in that endeavor, it took the best I could come up with and always computed the correct answers in a short time. While I did not perform any explicit timing tests, my distinct impression was that many of the computations are indeed faster than in previous versions.
Given the rapid expansion in the use of XML for data exchange, the ability to store Mathematica expressions in XML form is useful. Exporting information in XHTML format also is another step in keeping Mathematica in tune with the advance of technology. The online documentation is great and while "The Mathematica Book" is large enough to serve as a piece of exercise equipment, it is thorough and it is never more than arms length from my computer where Mathematica is loaded.
While there are mathematicians whose work would not be benefited by Mathematica, they have to be a small subset of the population. For most of us, it is an indispensable tool, adding to the amount of different things that you can do and also shortening the amount of time it takes you to do them. It is the one piece of software that I would chose if I ever faced the "if you were stranded on an island with only one program" question.

Published in Mathematics and Computer Education, reprinted with permission.

I use this software for my calc3-4 classes, and it is unbelievably helpful. At first I strictly used it for calculations, nothing more. Then, I started fooling around with graphs, and I discovered that this software was more powerful than I originally thought. I looked into it some more, and purchased Schaum's outline of mathematica and Trott's programming guidebook. I still don't know everything about this software, it is so powerful. But unfortunately, that's why it's so expensive. Find a copy at your university computer lab and mess around with it, because this is really neat software.