Mathematica is a general
software system for mathematical and other applications. It is used by
researchers,
engineers,
analysts and students from
high school to
grad school.
Development
Developed by
Wolfram Research, headed by
Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram was born in
London in 1959 and educated at
Oxford. He got his
Ph.D. in
theoretical physics from
Caltech in 1979. He spent two years on the faculty at Caltech and then four more at
The Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton. He then moved to the
University of Illinois to become director of the
Center for Complex Systems Research and Professor in several departments including
physics,
computer science and
mathematics.
His early research was mostly in high energy phsyics and quantum field theory, but in 1980 and 1981, he lead the development of the SMP computer algebra system, which was a forerunner for many of the elements found in Mathematica. The first version of Mathematica was released on June 23, 1988 and has since become an established tool in science, engineering and business.
Wolfram continues to do scientific research on various topics including cellular automata computer models, chaos theory and parallel computing. He has contributed greatly to computational fluid dynamics and continues to be a pioneer in the field of complex systems research.
Applications
Mathematica can be used simply as a
numerical or
symbolic calculator or a
graphing system for visualizing
functions or
data. However, the real power of Mathematica comes from a
high-level programming language which allows you to build
computer models or
data analysis environments. It even has animated interfaces for creating
stand-alone interfaces or
embedded applications.