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Version 11 of Mathematica

blog.wolfram.com

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Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#41

Post by bachmeier »

coldtea wrote: post #24
mathattack wrote: post #21

An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?

> An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. All those don't offer a seamless environment, that's hassle free, easy to setup, with commercial support, a great GUI, great documentation and works across so many science domains and with different approaches. So, the question is quite (but not that severely) like "what peo…

> hassle free, easy to setup, with commercial support, a great GUI, great documentation

Which of those doesn't apply to R?

> works across so many science domains

Mathematica offers the same statistical capabilities as R? Granted, I haven't used it in years, but that would be a new thing if true.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#42

Post by skolos »

bachmeier wrote: post #41
coldtea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. All those don't offer a seamless environment, that's hassle free, easy to setup, with commercial support, a great GUI, great documentation and works across so many science domains and with different approaches. So, the question is quite (but not that severely) like "what peo…

> hassle free, easy to setup, with commercial support, a great GUI, great documentation Which of those doesn't apply to R? > works across so many science domains Mathematica offers the same statistical capabilities as R? Granted, I haven't used it in years, but that would be a new thing if true.

Starting with version 9 Mathematica has built in integration with R. So you can use R in a seamless way from you Mathematica notebooks:

https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integr...

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#43

Post by throw102901 »

pjmlp wrote: post #39
mathattack wrote: post #21

An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?

It is how mainstream programming might have looked like if Lisp Machines instead of UNIX had caught on. Other than that, it is as coldtea answers.

Not every mishap in computing is the fault of Unix. :) SBCL and ACL2 run quite nicely on Unix, and their authors haven't been deterred by it. Neither have the Mathematica authors.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#44

Post by danieller »

taliesinb wrote: post #16
delish wrote: post #9

I recommend that Stephen Wolfram skeptics read this press release. I was surprised by language-level support for 3D printing: In Version 11 it’s finally realistic to take any 3D plot, and just 3D print it. I didn't know that I wanted this until I saw it. Generally I prefer small, simple languages. But Mathematica is my favorite large language. I'm also happy that, even though Mathematica 11 introduces flashy features…

> A question for Mathematica-folk: does Mathematica have support for direct manipulation like Toby Schachman's works?[] I find direct manipulation more pleasant than typing characters. Locator comes to mind: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Locator.html https://youtu.be/6wOLBVFdek8?t=11s And more generally Manipulate which makes it easy to whip together a let-me-explore-how-this-depends-on-that type of widg…

check out demonstrations.wolfram.com too - it's a place you can put manipulations if you want to use them in a class, etc

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#45

Post by sciyoshi »

Aardwolf wrote: post #2

Would have been great if this version fixed the syntax. Square brackets for function arguments makes no sense, neither mathematically, nor programming language wise :) Same for Sin requiring a capital letter, and curly braces instead of square brackets for matrices

I actually really like the consistency of Mathematica's syntax - parentheses are reserved for grouping expressions. You can also create matrices using the cell inputs in notebooks, which uses standard mathematical notation.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#46

Post by jlg23 »

mathattack wrote: post #21

An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?

> What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries.

Nothing; but Mathematica has been the tool of choice for cs education (or math+cs) and people tend to stick to what they know.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#47

Post by cschmidt »

mathattack wrote: post #21

An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?

I've used Mathematica, R, and Python extensively, and even Matlab (cringe). I reach for Mathematica when I need to do something symbolic (algebra, derivatives, etc.), and also for the built in graphics.

It is easy to interactively build up plots that give good insight into my data. It also is easy to problematically create quite complex plots. It is enough better at that that I don't just stick with R or python. I can get it done faster in Mma, and the plots also look nicer.

The distribution (random number) functions are also very nice, which I often use hand in hand with the histogram, when I want to play around with statistics.

Edit: The graphics also scale better for largish data sets. If I want to plot a few hundred thousand data points, Mma feels a lot faster.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#48

Post by verandaguy »

taliesinb wrote: post #26
verandaguy wrote: post #4

Great news. I'm particularly excited to see that they're implementing more thorough builtins for working with ANNs and other ML abstractions.

If you want to know more about the neural network stuff specifically there is a gallery of marketing examples at http://www.wolfram.com/language/11/neural-networks/?product=... and quite a few examples at http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/NetTrain.html (look under Applications near the bottom of the page). The current selection of layers is biased a bit towards vision, but my colleague and I are working on re…

>other data of a sequential or temporal character

Awesome! Good to hear that there will be abstractions for general data processing too, and not just audio/video/text.

reference.wolfram.com seems to be down as I write this, but I'll check back in a few hours.

If you're working on Mathematica as your comment implies, thanks for your contributions. It's a wonderful piece of software (even if closed source)!

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#49

Post by sciyoshi »

This is really exciting stuff. Mathematica is by far my favorite environment for doing data exploration and mathematics, and although there is a learning curve, the features of the language itself (pattern matching, symbolic manipulation) are extremely powerful. The quality and depth of Mathematica's documentation are excellent, and with these notebook interface changes things are bound to become even easier. Jupyter + tensorflow/scikitlearn comes close nowadays for machine learning, but I love having access to consistent data sets from within the environment.

Re: Version 11 of Mathematica

#50

Post by bloaf »

mathattack wrote: post #21

An open question independent of the author: What do people use Mathematica for that can't be done in R, SAS, Matlab, SPSS or Python libraries. Is it a great innovation that other tools have caught up with, or is it still getting a lot of use at the bleeding edge?

Lets say you want to build some fancy DIY project, like a food dehydrator. You want to make some mathematical models of the thing, so you pull up Mathematica.

To start with, maybe you want to solve some simple mass and energy balances on the thing to find out how much power it will take, and how long it will need to run. No problem, Mathematica does basic algebra right out of the box. It's also got a nice units system, so you can convert things easily.

Now you realize that your mass balances have turned into differential equations. No problem. Mathematica has that built in and you can immediately plug your mass balance equations into the ODE/PDE solver and get analytic or numerical answers.

Now you are interested in how to run the fans/heater so that your dehydrator stays in the safe ranges. No problem. Mathematica has that built in, and you can immediately start working with Mathematica's process control tools.

Now you've built the thing, and recorded some data. You want to make a calibration curve for your thermometer, refine your model's parameters, and make some graphs. No problem. Mathematica has built in data processing, curve fitting, and plotting tools. You can immediately get the answers you want, and plug them into your earlier work.

Of course, you can probably do all those things in python, or R, or Matlab. But in Mathematica, you don't even need to install optional components between each step. There is no hunting down and learning some 3rd party library. There is no need to try to wrestle your symbolic work into a form that your numerical number cruncher tool can understand. There is no creating awkward pipeline code to shoehorn the results of your statistical analysis back into your differential equation. Things play nice with each other.

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