Software Review

Fifteen years ago, I reviewed Mathematica 2 [1]. I thought that the system then had many very positive and a few very negative aspects. In 1999, I compared Mathematica 3 with six other general purpose computer algebra systems (CASs) [2]. All the systems were quirky (they still are!), but Mathematica performed reasonably well overall and could do some interesting examples, although it still lacked some important capabilities such as being able to make assumptions about variables. Time passes and software changes. Version 6 is now out, a much fancier system with many more functions and features, and an enhanced graphical user interface. For those readers not that familiar with CASs, an important resource to know about is Symbolic Net (http://www.symbolicnet.org/), which provides a variety of information including links to many of the known systems: general purpose and specialized, commercial, shareware, GNU General Public Licensed, free, etc. Some of these CASs (including some of the non-commercial ones like Axiom and Maxima) are quite sophisticated. I had asked for a review copy of Mathematica that ran on Linux. I received a large box that was mostly empty, containing a CD and a few thin documents. Not long after I registered my copy, I received an email offering a free update to version 6.0.1, a nice gesture as my review copy did not include Premier Service (a year’s subscription normally accompanies a purchase of Mathematica), which provides for software updates. Installation on my Linux server went well. However, when I tried to access Mathematica remotely via ssh and X-windows, I got an error about missing fonts. I visited the Documentation Center at http://reference. wolfram.com/, and after some hunting around, I found that I needed to make Mathematica fonts available on any Unix system I used that accessed a remote Mathematica installation. The easiest way to do this was to make a local copy of 4 Mb worth of fonts and then issue a couple of xset commands, thankfully detailed in the document that I had found. Actually, this problem with Unix fonts has been present in previous versions – I had forgotten until it bit me. Using Linux Mathematica remotely from an SGI or a Sun also resulted in other minor funniness, so I tried to work mostly from a remote Linux system. Back in 1992, I was particularly impressed with Mathematica’s documentation. The Mathematica Book was very well laid out and easy to use. Alas, with version 6, no written manual is provided or even exists – all system documentation is online, even the installation instructions. The reason for this, I was told, is that the system has become so large and complex that a manual would be huge and unwieldy. In Vernor Vinge’s 2006 novel Rainbows End, the net savvy folk of the future wear personal communication technology and much of society disdains the printed (as opposed to the electronic) word as it is difficult to search efficiently. However, one character defends the inexact art of library stack searching by noting that “I found answers to questions that I had never thought to ask”, often taking him in new valuable directions. Thus I feel that there continues to be a need for a properly indexed printed summary of the core language and functionality of Mathematica, and if Wolfram will not provide it, others will fill the gap. (I recently talked to one of the Mathematica developers, and he told me that he frequently refers to his Mathematica 5 Book [3].) The online documentation does have a table of contents and an alphabetical index of function names, but no topic index, although there is a text search feature which was helpful. As I find completely online documentation tedious, I ended up printing out a large amount of material. This required a great deal of mouse clicking, including expanding notebook sections and using File-> Save As . . . to convert the discussion into PostScript/PDF (the remote server was not connected to any local printers available to me and using File->Print to print to a file was somewhat erratic – I had to uncheck and check ‘Print to file’ in the Print dialog box to obtain a ‘Browse’ button and then a file was not always pro-