Mathematica 6 Launched

Ed Pegg writes "Wolfram Research has just released Mathematica 6. That link, in addition to the usual 'dramatic breakthrough' material, has an amazing flash banner that simultaneously shows a thousand mathematical demonstrations all at once. The animations came from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, a free service with 1200+ dynamically interactive examples of math, science, and physics, all with code. For the product itself, much is new or improved, with built-in math databases, improved visualizations, and more."

Comments

Can't anyone create a GNU version of Mathematica

[moly]

Mathematica has a killer engine (kernel), but a lousy UI, and it costs a shocking amount of money. Mathematica was one of the first pieces of software to scan your computer's MAC address and serial number while you entered the activation key, so it could not be installed on more than one computer (this after the $250-$1000 price tag). A student can get the castrated $250 version, but the real version is considerably pricier. Wolfram's treatment of his users is as distrustful as Micro-Suck.

Why can't the FOSS community beat Wolfram at this? Octave, Maxima, Yacas; they all fail miserably in comparison. The UI for Yacas is so idiotic that the function that transposes a matrix is Transpose[], a nine-character entry for an operation that a real mathematician may use a few hundred times in a given program. At least Mathematica is smart enough to use T (or at least it was when I last used it, at 4.0). Why can't we do better than this?

The best UI of any CAS was the UI for the built-in graphing calculator for Mac OS 9. The current version, NuCalc, is available for Mac and Windows, but it is proprietary, and there is no plan for a Linux/UNIX version. The FOSS community can put a UI like NuCalc over a Maxima engine, use MathML and/or LaTeX for the syntax (like LaTeX input, MathML output). Use code from GNU TeXmacs for the UI, but include the beautiful way that NuCalc simplifies fractions and radicals (and algebraic equations) by clicking on them with the mouse. Brilliant. And possible. Future generations of math and physics and engineering grad students will thank us.