

Ask HN: Anybody used Mathematica, for any reason? - adammichaelc

I was just digging around on WolframAlpha.com and there seem to be many different ways to use Mathematica:<p>http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/SoftwareEngineering/
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/MedicalImaging/
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/Chemistry/
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/ElectricalEngineering/<p>I was just curious if anybody here has ever used Mathematica, and what your experience has been. I'm asking mostly because I like using Wolfram's search engine, so I  am curious if other products by the company are worth looking into.
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jmakov
I worked in Mathematica quite a bit, still use it for some quick visualization
hacks. But after some time, I wanted to do stuff that wasn`t available in
Mathematica and the only choice would be to implement the algorithms by
myself. At that point I realized that I`m locked to Wolfram and started to
look for alternatives. I found <http://www.sagemath.org/> \- a python based
framework. Now if I want to use something like evolutionary algorithms and
some higher math, I can simply connect sagemath with e.g. pyevolve. And I
heard they have an interface for R...

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bbgm
Yep, I used it all through grad school, mostly around framing electronic
structure problems and doing spectral deconvolution. For a certain set of
problems it's really good especially for prototyping.

