I recently looked up mathematica, after reading up on wolfram; I then went to the site to find it cost $2,495 for a license :( Can anyone explain to me please what it exactly does and its worth in a few sentences? Thanks..
Mathematica is computational software. It has some powerful graphing capabilities and can be used to write technical reports. It can also handle very large sets of data. You write code to use it, and you can code C applications to access Mathematica. It is pretty powerful.
It is mainly used by scientists and engineers. I think you can get a home edition for around $300.
It is a very interesting program and can be used for data manipulation and mathematical research, I know that there are a large number of professors that supplement their research with mathematica and it seems to fit better than matlab with math based subjects.
Now there are some web based functionality that can be seen here: http://integrals.wolfram.com/index.jsp as well as it being the back for wolframalpha or so I am told.
Mathematica looks really powerful and practical. The demo was really impressive rrrrrrright up until he had to start using a Java library. Then it was all the creating of client objects and credentials objects, initializing things, marching to and fro... There may have been some factories in there; I skimmed it.
