Dr. Moretti’s Mathematica Talk
In Fall 2014 you probably saw an e-mail that announced that our campus now has an unlimited license to Wolfram Research’s Mathematica. This is great and we are very thankful that IT was able to upgrade the license – it’s a huge boon to our students. But many people across campus may not have any idea what the program does, so I recently gave a talk (sponsored by the SE Math Club) “What is Mathematica?”. This talk was meant as a general overview of Mathematica rather than a detailed look at how to do specific items.
Several faculty told me they were unable to attend the talk but were still interested; one suggested that I have the talk videoed and posted. I thought it would be better to go back and use Screen Recording to redo the presentation and fill in a few more details. The full presentation would run about an hour and forty minutes, so I’ve broken up the talk into its natural segments to make the sizes more manageable. Each video is now hosted on YouTube through the links below. I know I made a few minor verbal mistakes as I was going through some of the parts, but as I only had time for a few takes on each segment hopefully you’ll excuse any minor errors that I didn’t self-correct (hopefully anyone from Wolfram Research who sees these will be just as forgiving!). I hope you’ll like the presentation – if so let me know.
If you are interested in learning more about Mathematica and how to use it, we have a free textbook available for download as well as a library of Mathematica demonstrations. I’m also willing to set up more specific talks that go into more detail or work with various faculty as my schedule allows. Interested students can also take MATH 2003 – Technology for Mathematics, where we spend about two-thirds of the semester on Mathematica.
What is Mathematica? – Introduction
What is Mathematica? – Algebra and Trigonometry
What is Mathematica? – Graphing
What is Mathematica? – Calculus
What is Mathematica? – Probability and Statistics
What is Mathematica? – Working with External Databases
What is Mathematica? – Making Commands Interactive with Manipulate
What is Mathematica? – Some Applications (part 1)
What is Mathematica? – Some Applications (part 2)
As an extra portion for those interested in the programming aspect of Mathematica (which I did not do in my presentation), here’s a quick example of writing a program in Mathematica (finding and graphing a line given 2 points):
What is Mathematica? – A Programming Example