Wolfram Research Mathematica 8 review

Wolfram simplifies mathematical calculations with new method of entering questions

Version 8 of Wolfram Research's technical computing package Mathematica has changed the way users can input scientific queries for the first time in 20 years.

The new method is called free-form input and gives users an easier way to run a query in the Mathematica software.

Free-form input translates the query from the user automatically. But users can see what the translated version of their input is, and re-edit it to better optimise the output, if they feel the input was originally too general.

The new version also lets users forward queries keyed into Mathematica directly to the Wolfram Alpha online computational knowledge engine, which parses the input and returns the query results to Mathematica.

Mathematica version 8 adds useful enhancements to its statistics package, its engineering tools and image processing and analysis suite, and also gives users the ability to compile directly to C, which can make advanced calculations much faster.

Also in version 8 are an increased number of packaged data sets, better file format support, and support for graphics specialist nVidia's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) parallel computing architecture and the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) for GPU computation.

Wolfram Research's Mathematica scientific modelling, simulation and visualisation package has been around for more than 20 years, version 1.0 being released in 1988.

The basis of Mathematica's package was to try to make available a system for technical calculation that users could run, without having to learn a formal programming language, such as C, Fortran or Pascal.

Install
We registered on the Wolfram web site to download Mathematica 8 executables for Windows and Linux. The install on Windows using a Core 2 Duo 2.24GHz laptop with 2GB of system memory running under Windows 7 Ultimate took about eight minutes, while on our Red Hat Fedora 14 Linux OS, installation took about 10 minutes.

Mathematica 8 is backward-compatible with versions 6 and 7, and Wolfram says that users upgrading from versions including 5.2 or earlier, should still be able to get documents to work in Mathematica 8.

Using Mathematica's new syntax
Free-form input helps users by offering them a quicker way to enter queries without having to to understand Mathematica's syntax.

For example, if you wanted to do a simple plot of the mathematical solution to ‘Cos y + Sin x', the new syntax allows ‘plot sinx + cosy', rather than, 'Plot3D[Cos[y] + Sin[x], {x, -6.283, 6.283}, {y, -6.283, 6.283}]' [see picture].

Users can also specify input is forwarded to Wolfram Alpha to answer the query. However, free-form input sometimes doesn't represent the question you're trying to pose.

For example, you can easily plot of the blood protein molecule hemoglobin because it is a well-known protein that is held in the database.

But we were surprised by the number of instances in which Mathematica did not deliver the result we expected using free-form entry.

For example, we found that if you wanted to plot a less well-known protein, say the milk coagulant Chymosin, normally used to make cheese, it doesn't work using free-form.

Mathematica caters for all levels of technical expertise, and is a very good package, useful in a lot of scientific and financial compute areas.

The ability to compile directly to the C programming language allows a short-cut to program development. Users can generate C language functions that work inside Mathematica, or can be exported to give standalone programs or libraries that can be included in native C programs.

However, there will be times when dedicated programming suites are required because Mathematica doesn't compile to all programming languages, for example Cobol or Java.

The ability to use nVidia's CUDA parallel computing architecture and the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) for GPU computation will benefit users coding applications needing above average performance.

Conclusions
Mathematica 8 is a great technical computing package and will appeal to a new audience of less expert users. Expert users may question the need to upgrade to the new version because the headline new feature, free-form input, may be of limited use to them.