3 ms·

I use Mathematica as my advanced calculator. It’s a functional language with an extremely vast and consistent mathematical and non-mathematical library, top not

by oefrha 6y ago

I use Mathematica as my advanced calculator. It’s a functional language with an extremely vast and consistent mathematical and non-mathematical library, top notch symbolic capabilities (SymPy is just child’s play in comparison), top notch numerical capabilities, and very decent performance. You certainly don’t need to write your own rotation function — well, 2D rotation is trivial, but what if you want 3D rotation around a vector? Mathematica’s got you covered. Got a command line mode too, see MathKernel. The downside: it’s not free (as in beer or speech).

cytzol 6y ago
I know it's a very general question, but can I ask what sort of calculations you perform using Mathematica? Every time it has a new release, I download the demo and play around with it, but I never get as far as using it to actually compute anything that other CLI calculators couldn't do.
- oefrha 6y ago
  I’m a physicist so all kinds of numerical and symbolic calculations, e.g. very complicated integrals, differential equations, integral equations, and so on. I also work on math problems either seriously (way back when I was an undergrad I worked on some number theoretical problems where computational insight is very important) or for fun (think Project Euler style problems). If you just need to a calculator to do everyday arithmetic or unit conversions, or even simple physics calculations with units, it’s serious overkill... I certainly hardly ever need it when I’m wearing my programmer hat. I guess to answer is that the boundary between a calculator and a full blown computational environment is very blurry to me.
jointpdf 6y ago
Mathematica is free on Raspberry Pi, so someone could put together an amazing physical calculator: - https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ - https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/07/11/mathematica-12-available-on-the-new-raspberry-pi-4/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/07/11/mathematica-12-available...

by oefrha 6y ago

cytzol 6y ago

I know it's a very general question, but can I ask what sort of calculations you perform using Mathematica? Every time it has a new release, I download the demo and play around with it, but I never get as far as using it to actually compute anything that other CLI calculators couldn't do.

oefrha 6y ago
I’m a physicist so all kinds of numerical and symbolic calculations, e.g. very complicated integrals, differential equations, integral equations, and so on. I also work on math problems either seriously (way back when I was an undergrad I worked on some number theoretical problems where computational insight is very important) or for fun (think Project Euler style problems). If you just need to a calculator to do everyday arithmetic or unit conversions, or even simple physics calculations with units, it’s serious overkill... I certainly hardly ever need it when I’m wearing my programmer hat. I guess to answer is that the boundary between a calculator and a full blown computational environment is very blurry to me.

jointpdf 6y ago

Mathematica is free on Raspberry Pi, so someone could put together an amazing physical calculator: - https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/ - https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/07/11/mathematica-12-available-on-the-new-raspberry-pi-4/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/07/11/mathematica-12-available...