José Guillermo Sánchez León - Mathematica Beyond Mathematics: The Wolfram Language in the Real World

MATHEMATICA
BEYOND MATHEMATICS

THE WOLFRAM LANGUAGE
IN THE REAL WORLD

THE WOLFRAM LANGUAGE
IN THE REAL WORLD

Jos Guillermo Snchez Len

Universidad de Salamanca, Spain

CRC Press

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Version Date: 20170202

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If you have used Mathematica occasionally or heard of it, you may have the false impression that it is a program for performing complicated calculations, usually for academic purposes. However, this idea is far from the truth. Actually, Mathematica is much more than that. By putting together the computational power and ease of use of the Wolfram Language, Mathematicas high-level general-purpose programming language, the program can be used in any scientific or technical field: Aerospace engineering, environmental sciences, financial risk management, medical imaging and many others. (You can get an idea by visiting: http://www.wolfram.com/solutions).

Mathematica can be considered a tool that empowers non-professional programmers to develop applications although if you are a professional programmer, you will see that the software provides a development environment similar to the ones available for C++ or FORTRAN. You can even use the program to control external devices.

Although many books have been written about Mathematica, very few of them cover the new functionality added to the most recent versions of the program. This text introduces the new features using real-world examples, based on the experience of the author as a consultant. In the process, you will also learn more about the Wolfram Language and how you can use it to solve a wide variety of problems. Both are the most important objectives of the book. To accomplish that, the author raises questions from a wide range of topics and answers them by taking full advantage of Mathematicas latest features. For example: What is the hidden image in The Ambassadors painting by Holbein? What sources of energy does the world really use? How can we calculate tolerance limits in manufacturing processes? Are our cities getting warmer? Is the novel El Quijote written in Pi? How do we know how old our planet is? How can we find planets outside our solar system? How big is our galaxy? And the universe? How do we know it? How can we model the distribution of radioactive isotopes in the human body? And a tsunami? What are and how can we create Mandelbrot fractals? How can we measure the genetic distance between species? How can we perform financial calculations in real time? How do we value financial derivatives? How can we make entertaining simulations for teaching mathematics, physics, statistics, ... ? Why are there no free quarks?

The answers to the previous questions will not only help you master Mathematica, but also to become more familiar with the corresponding topics themselves.

This book will not only be useful to newcomers but also to those familiar with the program and interested in learning more about the new functionality included in the latest versions.

Those readers with minimal or no knowledge of Mathematica are strongly advised to read along with Stephen Wolframs book An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language available from within the program documentation: HelpWolfram DocumentationIntroductory Book

This text will also make it easy to start programming using the Wolfram Language and to learn how to take full advantage of its capabilities.

The final objective of Mathematica Beyond Mathematics is to help you avoid feeling overwhelmed by the softwares vast capabilities. The author has explored a significant part of them choosing the most relevant parts and illustrating them with examples from many different sources including the program documentation. Links to additional resources will also be provided. The main aim of all this is to reduce significantly the amount of time required to master the tool. The commands used will be explained using short sentences and simple examples.

Although this book is not a manual, inexperienced readers should at least read the first four chapters in consecutive order to gain a solid understanding of how Mathematica works. Regarding the rest of the chapters, you should keep in mind the following: a) is for those readers facing problem requiring big computational resources (parallel computing, grid-enabled calculations, etc.) and/or the ones interested in other programs related to Mathematica such as webMathematica for adding computational capabilities to websites or Workbench, a complete software development environment using the Wolfram Language.

The principal theme of each chapter is used as the motivation to illustrate certain features of Mathematica that you may find useful for solving a great variety of problems. For example: , covering the modeling of biological systems, discusses the resolution of differential equations in