Mathematica

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Topic 196754

I've noticed that Mathematica Home Edition has recently become available outside of USA/Canada and also at the low price of $295 AUD !! It is stated to be fully functional with respect to the Pro edition, merely licensed differently ( ie. hobbyists/enthusiasts ). Does anyone have experience with this Home Edition, and would care to comment? :-)

I am especially intrigued by the statement :

Quote:
... offers support for CUDA and OpenCL GPU computation, or you can compile directly to C with code generation tools ...


Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Mathematica

Also the Home Edition has a limit in the number of concurrent kernels to 4 ( generally 8 or 16 ) and 100 Wolfram/Alpha ( ie. their web service ) API calls per day if programmatically generated.

I think I'll buy it and see.

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

astro-marwil
astro-marwil
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Hallo Mike! Thanks for this

Hallo Mike!
Thanks for this hint. Please report here about your experiences with it. I´m searching for such a tool also. At now I have a very old version of MathCad.

Kind regards and happy crunching.
Martin

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: Hallo Mike! Thanks for

Quote:

Hallo Mike!
Thanks for this hint. Please report here about your experiences with it. I´m searching for such a tool also. At now I have a very old version of MathCad.

Kind regards and happy crunching.
Martin


Hi Martin! I make this a mini-blog if you like.

I bought it last night, one pays in USD which is more or less same in AUD. The download is 1.1GB, around half an hour on my broadband. You get activation details via email and enter the code on first use after install. No problem at all.

I fired into some of the video tutes which abound on their website. Much fun. NB : ALL function names are leading capitalised, square braces, comma for parameter delimiting and curly braces for lists. Got an animation of Cos[x]Sin[y] surface ( Animate[Plot3D[Cos[]Sin[]]] ) going across the x-y plane ( height above is the function value ) fairly easily. Like waves on the sea : use Cos[x+a]Sin[y+a] thus making 'a' your animation variable. Nicely colorised. A quick edit of the input command gives contour lines. I'm impressed by the context sensitive help, syntax coloring as you type if you've made a mistake on your input line, suggestions for correction and also hints for further elaborations. You can take the default settings for various attributes ( eg. plot axis display choices ) which are sensibly chosen by the engine or tune you own depending on how much micromanagement pleases you.

For those of us ( me! ) who like/need visualisation to understand mathematics beyond/behind the symbology then Mathematica is brilliant. I'd fiddled with an earlier version on a friend's computer some years ago and have yearned ever since. :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Rod
Rod
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Its been on my wish list for

Its been on my wish list for couple years now, I just didn't have the heart to spring for it. I have been getting by on octave python and matplotlib.

I would use more encouragement as it still on my wish list as I am absolutely not going to spring for matlab:-)

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: Its been on my wish

Quote:

Its been on my wish list for couple years now, I just didn't have the heart to spring for it. I have been getting by on octave python and matplotlib.

I would use more encouragement as it still on my wish list as I am absolutely not going to spring for matlab:-)


MatLab is OK, but not my cup of tea really. Not for ~ $800 anyway. I did use a student version ( ~ $200 ) for a couple of years when I was doing an online IT course but that license has now expired.

Now I may be imagining things, but having just looked at Mathematica's Workbench facility it looks a dead ringer for the Eclipse interface! :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Now here's a neat idea from

Now here's a neat idea from Mr Wolfram. The Computable Document Format. So I ( with Mathematica ) can show you ( possibly without Mathematica ) what I have produced. Download the free Wolfram CDF Player. Now you can have a look at this, which is a plot of the famous, classical and beautiful, Boltzmann distribution for a collection of particles in equilibrium !!

The horizontal axes are temperature ( 0 to 1000 from front to back and with a color gradient ) and energy level ( from left to right ). The vertical scale is state population relative to the lowest. So at zero Kelvin all the entities are huddled at the lowest energy levels and if the temperature is increased higher energy levels gain more population ( so the surface rises towards the back ). Don't take the energy axis units too seriously as I have effectively scaled to make Boltzmann's constant equal to one. The mesh lines parallel to the energy axis give successive exponential curves and illustrates how increasing temperature reduces the decay of that with temperature, thus embodies :

Exp[-E/kT]

I will explore the idea of these CDF's having some controls embedded in them, sliders and whatnot, that vary some parameter(s) and thus animate or demonstrate some mathematical features more fluently. I think this is a brilliant concept.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) There's an interesting codicil to this. The strict thermodynamic definition of temperature ( see the Zeroeth Law ) requires consideration of systems at equilibrium. Boltzmann's distribution, at least classically, describes such systems and so one can actually use the pattern of populations to define thermodynamic temperature. Thus IF a system is in equilibrium AND only the lowest energy states are occupied THEN the temperature is low.

Boltzmann's distribution assumes that the entities within are distinguishable. Classically this is possible, for while we can't 'paint' particles we can follow their tracks ( gedanken experiment here ) by arbitrarily and thus infinitesimally low energy probes ( eg. photons ) and thus 'individualise' our description. So we could characterise our microstates in detail while remaining (a) infinitesimally close to an isolated system and (b) keep the disturbance to the particles also arbitrarily low and hence the distribution is as close to a pure Boltzmann shape as we like.

However using quantum mechanics, whatever probe we use will not simultaneously have an arbitrarily low energy and an arbitrary resolution ( Heisenberg ). So we must use the statistics of indistinguishable particle collections, either Fermi/Dirac or Bose/Einstein. In the limit of either high energy and/or low density all these statistical patterns approach each other.

( edit ) Conversely IF a system is at equilibrium AND has all energy states equally occupied THEN the temperature is infinite ! :-)

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Rod
Rod
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I have downloaded a free

I have downloaded a free trial of Mathematica. I like the fact that its intuitive. I don't have my head buried in a users manual.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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RE: I have downloaded a

Quote:
I have downloaded a free trial of Mathematica. I like the fact that its intuitive. I don't have my head buried in a users manual.


I agree, I was doing serious stuff within the hour. :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Rod
Rod
Joined: 3 Jan 06
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Well my trail run has ended.

Well my trail run has ended.
I had some fun with it. I ordered a couple of books to explore further: 'Dynamical Systems with Applications with Mathematica' and 'Simulating Neural Networks with Mathematica'. I have to hold off until my disposable cash gets a little more flush before purchasing. I look forward to when I have some time to explore Neural Nets with Parallella.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold

Bikeman (Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein)
Bikeman (Heinz-...
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Hi! FYI, for those who

Hi!

FYI, for those who want to play around a bit with Mathematica, there is now a rather unusual way to do so for free (as far as the software is concerned):

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that Mathematica and the Wolfram Language are from now on free to use on the Raspberry Pi credit-card-size mini computer (which itself costs around 50 bucks (the board, power supply, keyboard, mouse).

The Wolfram Language and Mathematica on Raspberry Pi, for free

The small 512 MB RAM of the Raspberry Pi limits the kind of projects you can do with it, but still, for hobbyists etc, it's kind of cool.

Cheers
HB

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