Out in Front: May 9, 1996
Those in awe of the numeric and symbolic computational power and 3-D visualization capabilities of Wolfram Research's Mathematica software may have shied away from buying the package because of the time required to learn the built-in programming language. Now, they have fewer reasons to delay a purchase. Among the improvements in V3.0 of Mathematica is the ability solve problems stated in traditional mathematical notation or in plain English. The new version also solves many problems significantly faster than earlier versions did. Although this version, like its predecessors, interprets problem statements on the fly, the built-in compiler now handles more operations, speeding some by an order of magnitude.
The vendor says that Mathematica is now a complete technical-publishing facility. In addition to creating paper documents, the package can create interactive hypertext documents that include sound and animated video. The built-in programming language now handles the creation of custom user interfaces and the generation of custom reports. Mathematica for Macintosh, Windows, OS/2, Linux, and the Intel version of NextStep costs $995. A single-user license for a multiuser operating system, such as Unix, costs $1995. The electrical-engineering application pack costs $995.
—by Dan Strassberg
Wolfram Research Inc, Champaign, IL. (800) 441-6284.