Comments on: Integrals!

Integrals!

Upton O'Good — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:35:43 -0800

The Integrator is Mathematica's integration capabilities, available over the web. Other online resources from Wolfram include Tones, an automatic music generator, and the venerable Mathworld, an extensive collection of math terms and theorems. (which, yes, has been mentioned previously.)

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:44:29 -0800

Gah! Wolfram, where were you in 1990 when I needed you!

By: DU

DU — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:48:08 -0800

From my infrequently-used-but-when-I-need-it-I-NEED-it bookmark: online math tools (of which The Integrator) is one.

By: COBRA!

COBRA! — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:51:05 -0800

Gah! Wolfram, where were you in 1990 when I needed you! Heh. Three years after that, Mathematica was seriously fucking up my education; the head of our math department was so deeply in love with the program that my first two quarters of Calc were almost solely devoted to learning how to plug things into Mathematica. I still hold a grudge.

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:54:52 -0800

The other branches of ScienceWorld are less known that MathWorld (they're newer, and not nearly as comprehensive), and hard to find links to from elsewhere on the site. I love the functions site, too. Then again, I'm a complete nerd for coding in Mathematica. It's a beautiful, beautiful language.

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:57:10 -0800

Symbolic integration, by the way, has reached heights I never expected. The same is true for summation of series. Sometimes it's just jaw-dropping, even if you're acquainted with some of the machinery behind the scenes.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:00:30 -0800

I still hold a grudge. Three years later, safely beyond the grasp of math professors, out came Maple. Yeah. I was bitter. But not much, because back in the day it was harder to encode a complex formula for Maple than it was to just integrate it by hand. Well, for the stuff I was doing, which was merely senior undergrad work as opposed to first-year undergrad work. Those Maple guys needs to get their web on.

By: grobstein

grobstein — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:31:23 -0800

I was about to sigh about how I wished I had access to this at the beginning of my mathematical education in college, but then I realized I did (though not on the web).

By: jesirose

jesirose — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:43:28 -0800

This is awesome, as my Calc class just started Integration yesterday! Thanks.

By: thecaddy

thecaddy — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:53:17 -0800

This is awesome, 'cause I lost my TI-89 years ago.

By: geoff.

geoff. — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:25:16 -0800

How does Mathematica compare to Matlab? I've used Matlab for doing financial modeling but never used Mathematica ... worth the switch?

By: NormieP

NormieP — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:43:41 -0800

geoff.: Mathematica's big strength is its ability to do symbolic computations. MATLAB cannot do this unless you are using the rather unintuitive sym toolbox (which is really just a front end to Maple anyway).

By: tylermoody

tylermoody — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:46:32 -0800

geoff: It depends on what you're using it for. In my engineering school there is a bitter divide between departments over which is better, but they are quite similar. If you've found Matlab useful, it probably isn't worth the effort to switch.

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:59:49 -0800

No, they aren't very similar at all unless your scope is limited to doing 2+2 kind of stuff that you could do on an old-school scientific calculator anyway.

By: caddis

caddis — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:37:28 -0800

Have math problems to solve? Get the right answers with Mathematica for Students. Now where was this when I was in calc?

By: staggernation

staggernation — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:00:56 -0800

I found this post derivative.

By: spaceman_spiff

spaceman_spiff — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:50:56 -0800

Am I the only person who gets irritated by the existence of yet another single-purpose language? Seriously, why can't Mathematica (and MATLAB/Maple) use Perl or Python or something *standard* as its scripting language of choice?

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:01:33 -0800

Well, Mathematica long predates PHP and had its first public version appear roughly contemporaneously with Perl 1.0. It would have taken some kind of foresight, hm? In any event, Mathematica is a functional language; its philosophy has about as much in common with Perl and PHP as chalk has with cheese.

By: xil

xil — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:14:53 -0800

spaceman_spiff: Mathematica has been around since 1988, so it's almost exactly the same age as Perl and is several years older than Python. It's not such a surprise that it uses its own language.

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:21:04 -0800

%%/.PHP->Python

By: The Power Nap

The Power Nap — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:12:57 -0800

Once again Maxima is getting no love.

By: pombe

pombe — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:14:16 -0800

Heh, this reminds me of the time my physics TA returned a problem set to me with the note "please do not use an integral table for these simple integrals". For those discussing the Matlab/Mathmatica difference: I've not used Mathematica but Matlab is designed for doing linear algebra and manipulating arrays. I find it very useful for data analysis and other operations where the native entity is a vector or an array. My understanding is that Mathematica is designed more for solving equations. And Matlab dates to 1984, so it also has a good reason for not using perl/python/php/etc.

By: spaceman_spiff

spaceman_spiff — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:32:14 -0800

Bad choice of language examples on my part ... I'm still frustrated that these programs use their own languages, as opposed to languages that are "out there" in the wild. But then, I suppose I'm just being lazy. I'd rather use the chainsaw I have than the Xacto knife I'd have to go buy.

By: redbeard

redbeard — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:51:38 -0800

Yeah, I'm totally a maxima man. It's pretty awesome. And.....Viva la R!

By: crinklebat

crinklebat — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:53:34 -0800

Oh, the integrator, favored tool of me when I was in my first year of college. Of course, now I'm in my fourth year and I kind of panic a little when I'm asked to do calculus.

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:53:58 -0800

If I'm reading you right, you seem to have the idea that the language is something auxilliary that has been grafted onto a computer algebra system; the fact is that Mathematica or Maple simply is a language, nothing more, nothing less; they were invented because no other existing language made it comfortable and natural to do the things mathematicians (or at least, their authors) routinely want to do. Saying "Why doesn't Mathematica just use Perl?" (or any other language you like) makes about as much sense as saying "Why doesn't LISP just use C?" What the heck would that even mean?

By: sergeant sandwich

sergeant sandwich — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 20:44:30 -0800

wolfdog, i totally agree, btw - the functions site is about the most useful free thing in the universe. saved my ass more than once last semester (up yours, j.d. jackson!)

By: outlier

outlier — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 06:46:02 -0800

How does Mathematica compare to Matlab? I've used Matlab for doing financial modeling but never used Mathematica ... worth the switch? At a conference, I once heard someone offer this comparison: "When Matlab crashes, it crashes fast." Bad choice of language examples on my part ... I'm still frustrated that these programs use their own languages, as opposed to languages that are "out there" in the wild. Both M's are deeply smart software that have been around for years, from when it was necessary to write a new language to do such deep math. Still, I think it would be great if "someone" (i.e. the ubiquitous someone other than me, with plenty of time for such a mammoth task) made a computer mathematical system based on a more modern or flexible language. Although Wolfram has made noise about making Mathematica a more general programming environment / language, in my experience it's ill-suited for such a thing: slow, resource-hungry and you need to use it daily to stay familiar. (Note: to clarify, Mathematica is fabulous for what it does. Above, I'm disparaging it's ability to do non-mathematical tasks.)

By: jewzilla

jewzilla — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:04:16 -0800

Sucks to you, fancy software! My TI-92 saved my life more times than I care to count. Sure, it didn't make girls like me in college, but who needs that when your calculator can do symbolic integrals? Oh, I needed that.

By: caddis

caddis — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:25:32 -0800

but who needs that when your calculator can do symbolic integrals this is why you need a puppy. calculators solve math problems, and puppies solve people problems.