MATHEMATICA

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DESCRIPTION

Mathematica is the world's only fully integrated environment for technical computing. First released in 1988, it has had a profound effect on the way computers are used in many technical and other fields.

It is often said that the release of Mathematica marked the beginning of modern technical computing. Ever since the 1960s individual packages had existed for specific numerical, algebraic, graphical and other tasks. But the visionary concept of Mathematica was to create once and for all a single system that could handle all the various aspects of technical computing in a coherent and unified way. The key intellectual advance that made this possible was the invention of a new kind of symbolic computer language that could for the first time manipulate the very wide range of objects involved in technical computing using only a fairly small number of basic primitives.

When Mathematica Version 1 was released, the New York Times wrote that "the importance of the program cannot be overlooked", and Business Week later ranked Mathematica among the ten most important new products of the year. Mathematica was also hailed in the technical community as a major intellectual and practical revolution.

The diversity of Mathematica's user base is striking. It spans all continents, ages from below ten up, and includes for example artists, composers, linguists and lawyers. There are also many hobbyists from all walks of life who use Mathematica to further their interests in science, mathematics and computing.

At a technical level, Mathematica is widely regarded as a major feat of software engineering. It is one of the largest single application programs ever developed, and it contains a vast array of novel algorithms and important technical innovations. Among its core innovations are its interconnected algorithm knowledge base, and its concepts of symbolic programming and of document-centered interfaces.

The development of Mathematica has been carried out at Wolfram Research by a world-class team led by Stephen Wolfram. The success of Mathematica has fueled the continuing growth of Wolfram Research, and has allowed a large community of independent Mathematica-related businesses to develop. There are today well over a hundred specialized commercial packages available for Mathematica, as well as more than three hundred books devoted to the system.

FEATURES

Features of Mathematica include:

   - Elementary mathematical function library
   - Special mathematical function library
   - Matrix and data manipulation tools including support for sparse arrays
   - Support for complex number, arbitrary precision, interval arithmetic and symbolic computation
   - 2D and 3D data and function visualization and animation tools
   - Solvers for systems of equations, diophantine equations, ODEs, PDEs, DAEs, DDEs and recurrence relations
   - Numeric and symbolic tools for discrete and continuous calculus
   - Multivariate statistics libraries including fitting, hypothesis testing, and probability and expectation calculations on over 100 distributions.
   - Constrained and unconstrained local and global optimization
   - Programming language supporting procedural, functional and object oriented constructs
   - Toolkit for adding user interfaces to calculations and applications
   - Tools for image processing and morphological image processing including image recognition
   - Tools for visualizing and analysing graphs
   - Tools for combinatoric problems
   - Tools for text mining including regular expressions and semantic analysis
   - Data mining tools such as cluster analysis, sequence alignment and pattern matching
   - Number theory function library
   - Tools for financial calculations including bonds, annuities, derivatives, options etc.
   - Group theory functions
   - Libraries for wavelet analysis on sounds, images and data
   - Control systems libraries
   - Continuous and discrete integral transforms
   - Import and export filters for data, images, video, sound, CAD, GIS, document and biomedical formats
   - Database collection for mathematical, scientific, and socio-economic information and access to WolframAlpha data and computations
   - Technical word processing including formula editing and automated report generating
   - Tools for connecting to DLLs. SQL, Java, .NET, C++, FORTRAN, CUDA, OpenCL and http based systems
   - Tools for parallel programing
   - Using both "free-form linguistic input" (a natural language user interface) and Mathematica language in notebook when connected to the Internet.

VERSION HISTORY

Mathematica built on the ideas in Cole and Wolfram's earlier Symbolic Manipulation Program (SMP).

Wolfram Research has released the following versions of Mathematica:

   * Mathematica 1.0 (June 23, 1988)
   * Mathematica 1.1 (1989)
   * Mathematica 1.2 (August 1, 1989)
   * Mathematica 2.0 (January 15, 1991)
   * Mathematica 2.1 (June 15, 1992)
   * Mathematica 2.2 (June 1, 1993)
   * Mathematica 3.0 (September 3, 1996)
   * Mathematica 4.0 (May 19, 1999)
   * Mathematica 4.1 (November 2, 2000)
   * Mathematica 4.2 (November 1, 2002)
   * Mathematica 5.0 (June 12, 2003)[73]
   * Mathematica 5.1 (October 25, 2004)
   * Mathematica 5.2 (June 20, 2005)
   * Mathematica 6.0 (May 1, 2007)
   * Mathematica 6.0.1 (July 5, 2007)
   * Mathematica 6.0.2 (2008)
   * Mathematica 6.0.3 (2008)
   * Mathematica 7.0 (November 18, 2008)
   * Mathematica 7.0.1 (March 5, 2009)
   * Mathematica 8.0 (November 15, 2010)
   * Mathematica 8.0.1 (March 7, 2011)