evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Steve Crandall) (07/07/88)
I have been using a "beta" version of Mathematica on my Mac for a few weeks now. Symbolic algebra programs tend to have their own flavors and uses - Reduce is very different from Maple is very different from SMP is very different from Macysma, etc... If you have a background with SMP you will find Mathematica an extension of that paradigm. The front end seems to be done very well -- you can run a Mathematica "kernel" on a variety of machines and connect to it with a display kernel on a Mac or whatever - or - you can run it on a single machine. One note -- it DOES like memory. Two meg is required just to boot it on a Mac. I found myself running out of memory doing very simple problems with 2 Meg and frantically searched for a memory expansion. Now that I'm running 5 Meg things are much smoother. If you are interested in the program, Addison-Wesley is publishing the manual [Mathematica S. Wolfram 0-201-19334-5 1988], which is an excellent tour of the program and its capabilities.
sorensen@hstbme.mit.edu (A. Gregory Sorensen) (07/11/88)
We've been using a beta version on the Mac for a while now, and the program, well, is still in beta stages. The earlier comments about RAM-hunger are definitely true. Especially if you like symbolic math. Our 2Mb MacII shuts right down when we try to invert a 4x4 matrix. We hope to get some more RAM to fix the problem. Also, Mathematica is not as smart as we were hoping. For example, to invert a rotation matrix by hand, one usually transposes and then takes the complex conjugate...But Mathematica fails to recognize things like sin^2 + cos^2 = 1 and things like that, and doesn't do the inversion properly unless you tell it that. For direct numerical evaluation, though, Mathmatica is fast. Does anyone know if the "real" version is shipping?