

Mathematica home edition, finally. $300. - herdrick
http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematicahomeedition/qa.html

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biohacker42
I own a very old student version of Mathematica, not that I can use it, since
transferring it to a new machine was beyond my technical abilities, thanks to
their copy protection.

At $300 I would buy it, even though I have no specific need, it is a great
application.

But I'd hate to spend $300 and only be able to install it exactly once.

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babul
On a side note, the scrapbook of the company history is very interesting (a
startup story beginning >20 years ago with one guy)...

[http://www.wolfram.com/company/scrapbook/page02.html#1988_St...](http://www.wolfram.com/company/scrapbook/page02.html#1988_StoryGetsOut)

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gaius
Not in the UK tho, WTF!? I have been badgering Wolfram about this for _years!_

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demallien
Yeah, I was really pleased when I saw the headline, and then - only for the
US/Canadian market. :-( I'm guessing it has something to do with being able to
identify whether a credit card is linked to a person or an organisation. Does
anyone know the details of how that works?

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gaius
Wolfram do have a UK presence tho', I've spoken to people in their office here
(and have just emailed them about this). So there's no reason they couldn't do
whatever checks they do here too.

I'm using Sage at home at the moment which is fairly impressive in its own
right, but it's not the same. Check it out: <http://www.sagemath.org/>

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globalrev
how is Mathematica compared to Matlab? As I understand Mathematica is for all
kinds of math while Matlab is basically only matrix and linear algebra-
stuff(with a lot of libraries for applications of that).

Is Mathematica as good as Matlab for linear algebra?

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hs
for plotting, matlab is a bit 'lower level' where you map a function over a
range and then plot the list of return values

for linear algebra, matlab is more succinct, it has "'" transpose and "^-1"
for inverse, so you can type x = A' _(A_ A')^-1*b

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mhartl
You can do that in _Mathematica_ , too:
<http://documents.wolfram.com/mathematica/functions/Transpose>

_Mathematica_ has an extensive set of typesetting shortcuts. You just need to
know where to look.

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glomek
I dumped Mathematica many, many years ago when they turned evil and started
making it stop working after a month if you haven't registered it.

~~~
gaius
What did you switch to?

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msie
I was trying to avoid reading Hacker News more than once a day but I was glad
I saw this on my second visit! :)

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tocomment
Can someone please make a joke about a new kind of science or how celluar
automata solves every problem in every field? (I couldn't think of any)

But seriously, what can I do with mathematica? Should I buy this?

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likpok
Mathematica is a very powerful Lisp-based programming language(without user-
visible s-expressions). It is (to an extent) designed for numerical/symbolic
math; there are a lot of libraries available for that.

However, they've added a lot of other libraries, for things like image
processing, etc.

It is a very powerful system, however somewhat limited by poor market
penetration (nothing else uses it, so only people with Mathematica could use
it).

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pfedor
A friend of mine who's a physicist claims that he's so used to Mathematica
that he uses it for everyday scripting tasks, the way other people use Tcl or
Perl.

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ph0rque
I came across a web page made in mathematica once...

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cturner
Yeah - I met a chap at an openbase conference in 2005 that was using it for
professional web-application development. I've been intrigued by the idea ever
since. I'd be interested to hear more stories from people who really leverage
it like this.

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dreeves
I use mathematica for general scripting tasks. It takes a little hackery to do
things like use it in a pipeline and such:
<http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves/mash/mash.pl>

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kcy
Can you do all the image/signal processing stuff with the home edition?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382986>

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designtofly
The answer is right there on the linked page.

Q: How is Mathematica Home Edition different from the professional version of
Mathematica?

Mathematica Home Edition is a fully functional version of Mathematica
Professional with the same features.

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nx
I'm sorry, I'm probably missing the point. Why is it the same product with the
same features but with a different name?

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likpok
The problem with Mathematica for serious development is that you need
Mathematica to run the stuff. So if you write a gadget/utility, only people
with Mathematica can run it.

This is an attempt to get deeper penetration into the hobbyist market.

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programnature
You can freely distribute your UI-based 'gadgets' and what not using
Mathematica Player, which is a free download.
<http://www.wolfram.com/products/player/>

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llimllib
sweet! Now I need a project so I can put my money where my mouth is:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369109>

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henning
I'm enjoying working through [http://www.amazon.com/Illustrating-Evolutionary-
Computation-...](http://www.amazon.com/Illustrating-Evolutionary-Computation-
Mathematica-Intelligence/dp/1558606378) .

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tokenadult
Doesn't the Mathematica for the Classroom version have additional notebooks
that produce classroom handouts conveniently? I see that it has an even lower
price for eligible teachers.

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FlorinAndrei
"We are sorry, but this item is not currently available for your region."

My region is Northern California. Hmmm...

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icey
Are you proxied?

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colgur
Great price compared to the Pro edition. How does Mathematica compare with R
for statistics?

