[zanyterp]

looking over the outlined course schedule at school (and while talking with the advisor), i noticed that several classes require a computer based calculating program (mathematica specifically mentioned) and i am wondering if any of you have experience with this on either the 15 or 17"er and which should theoretically do better? thanks!!

nick :smile:

[coolmacdude]

Mathematica is really great. You are lucky. My school forces us to use Maple which sucks horribly compared to Mathematica.

[zanyterp]

Originally posted by coolmacdude:
Mathematica is really great. You are lucky. My school forces us to use Maple which sucks horribly compared to Mathematica.

at least in sounds like it is encouraged and taught. . .it is sold in the bookstore. so i guess that is a good thing then if it is that good of a program. . .you had opportunity to run either on a 'book?

[AlbertWu]

I'm running mathematica 5 for students on my PowerBook G4 12inch, and it runs great. It'll run on pretty much anything above a G3. Only thing that your processor speed affects is how fast the calculations finish.

[compact]

I used it all the time on my old 350 MHz iMac with no problem. For regular (ie. student) use it's not a very demanding application; any of the G4 Powerbooks would be overkill, if anything,

[bauhaus]

I hated Mathematica. (I could get that sucker's kernel to crash faster than anyone I know.) I spent some time at Wolfram for a while (due to connections with the NSCA at UIUC) and pretty much told them it sucked (yeah, I wasn't real helpful, just thought they'd like to know.) Seems they were aware of all the kernel issues but they just "needed to put the product out" because they needed to have a revenue stream and they hadn't updated it for awhile. The last time I used it was in 1997.

The point of this story is that there is a program called Matlab that is (IMHO) superior to Mathematica; it's very stable and runs on almost every UNIX and was developed on UNIX (it predates the use of Windows, etc, for heavy calculations where all the real number crunching was done on a UNIX mainframe.) I don't know what the carry over to *nix is, but it probably has been ported to Linux/FreeBSD/OS X. It's something to check out when Mathematica drives you insane at 3 in the morning (or better yet, start here and spare yourself the grief.)

(For the longest time, Matlab and LaTeX were the staples for any Physics or Math major at schools like Berkley, Caltech, or MIT)

[pimephalis]

If you are on a tight budget (read: starving student), then you might want to consider Octave, a free alternative to MatLab. You can find some information about the project here.

And before anyone here gets their backs up, please note that I'm NOT saying that this is the same as Mathematica. It's a very powerful free piece of software used extensively by academics who don't need all the bells and whistles Mathematica provides. I liken Octave to the R-project, the free implementation of an S+ - like statistical program. Not always pretty, but so powerful and open that it is used by huge numbers of statisticians worldwide over other programs which cost a pretty penny.

Anyway, just some food for thought.

[voyageur]

Matlab 6.5 is available for OS X.

[bauhaus]

I just priced out the student version of MatLab (it has basically the core product and you can add more advanced features as you need them) and it's $99 with media and manual. $59 for each module add-on.

Pretty good pricing, in my opinion for how advanced it is. The school I went to had a site-wide license (hint, it was one of the three I mentioned before ) which made the cost under $20 to legally have a copy for the whole program and all modules; you just went to the campus computing center, told them you wanted MatLab and you paid for an "add on" license and they burned a copy of the program to CD for you. It could then be linked to the networked system for large scale projects with fellow campus users when it was necessary (which cropped up outside of my freshmen year.)

[m@]

I use Mathematica 4.2 and Matlab on a regular basis on my poor little PBG4 500, with no major problems. The are two very different programs. One excels in symbolic maths (rearranging, simplifying etc) and the other in raw number crunching (numeric solutions, display of vast amount of data etc).

I use Matlab to process, and plot my raw experimental data, and Mathematica to model the physics behind it. Have never really used Maple that much as I had to study Mathematica a university and I kind of stuck with me.

(...and Steve Jobs apparently came up with the name Mathematica)

[Arkham_c]

I worked as a student assistant in the computer labs for a couple of years when I was in school at Georgia Tech. We had Mathematica on all the Macs (Quadra 700s, if that tells you how long ago it was), along with Maple and Matlab.

Maple was a newcomer back then, but most people who had assignments in it seemed to like it (I was done with my math classes by the time we got it). Mathmatica was known as "math-magica" because it was a miracle if it actually worked. It was very finicky about spacing and syntax and would work or not work for no seemingly good reason. Maybe that has changed now, but I don't know.

Matlab was my favorite. It was more geared towards discrete math than symbolic stuff, but it was really great for DSP simulations, vector processing, and the like. I remember doing some interesting work with soundwave processing and generating in Matlab when I was a sophomore or junior.

[coolmacdude]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
I worked as a student assistant in the computer labs for a couple of years when I was in school at Georgia Tech. We had Mathematica on all the Macs (Quadra 700s, if that tells you how long ago it was)

Lol yeah. We have a bunch of Dual 1.25's now (all with Cinema displays ).

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
Maple was a newcomer back then, but most people who had assignments in it seemed to like it (I was done with my math classes by the time we got it). Mathmatica was known as "math-magica" because it was a miracle if it actually worked. It was very finicky about spacing and syntax and would work or not work for no seemingly good reason. Maybe that has changed now, but I don't know.

Maple is still primarily used. While it's ok on WIndows, it's nowhere close to as good as Mathematica on the Mac. They worked a long time on the core of it optimizing things for Darwin but then threw a buggy, slow as hell Java GUI on top of it.

[urban]

we use maple and pro fit and minitab...