mathematica 5.2 for students free download

Artificial Intelligence was then all the rage, at least among those of us short on the natural variety, and the idea appealed to me of applying a communications engineering technique of looking for a signal-in-noise in a system which actually had symbols for what it was looking for in other words one that had thoughts. I quickly got the idea and tried writing a symbolic Fourier analyser. But I had been retreaded as a computer programmer and Id somehow got it into my head that this was how it had to be done.

The symbolic differentiator never handled a mathematical variable as a binary quantity at all it certainly never performed finite difference, in circumstances fraught with rounding errors, and pretended it was doing calculus. As a mathematician I should have been suspicious of the Babbage school of computing which saw a mathematical formula as the (unwieldy) specification for a series of instructions to be performed in sequence on a numeric accumulator. I was awed by the power of the technique. This was built on top of a macro-processor, not unlike the C preprocessor. In 1973 at the Peterlee scientific centre I came across Salah Mandil and his symbolic differentiator. For nowadays the Mathematica engine has a top end! For the six months Ive had Mathematica to play with, Ive scarcely typed a line of Mathematica language like the above. How blinkered I was! Nobody criticises Dreamweaver because HTML is so ugly to type. as any APLer might be who had been forced to use C/C++. I remember thinking then that insofar as it was like APL it was good, insofar as it wasnt it was bad.

I first came across Mathematica at an educational exhibition nearly 15 years ago.

This article therefore is aimed at jobbing APLers like myself whose exposure to Mathematica may be slight. But Mathematica needs no promotion from me its user base is huge and extensive, far beyond the provenance of Mathematics, pure and applied, as a typical university department understands it. As a rank beginner addressing other rank beginners where Mathematica is concerned, this is hardly a review of 5.2 so much as a review of Mathematica itself. When I sent away for the free Mathematica trial disk, version 5.2 hadnt yet been released.

Mathematica 5.2 for students free download