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Mathematica 14

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Mathematica 14

#11

Post by nxobject »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

Its "batteries included" philosophy (well, more like the entire power plant) – for example, very convenient and broad visualization and declarative UI libraries; very good online documentation as well; of course, the OG interactive notebook interface, too.

If the cost of that is shining Stephen Wolfram's dome, well, what can you do.

Re: Mathematica 14

#12

Post by primitivesuave »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

I'm a software developer and use it for one-off tasks like image processing (create an SVG from a folder of images), quick visualization of data (read a giant JSON file and create bar charts from certain keys), file preparation, and much more. It's taken me several years to really feel like a power user, where I intuitively know which functions to use and how to compose/customize them. When I worked at Wolfram Research (over a decade ago), I even made a proof-of-concept for programming Arduino microcontrollers and controlling them directly from the notebook interface.

It's a powerful tool with a steep learning curve - hopefully the LLM assistant will help with this.

Re: Mathematica 14

#13

Post by jiggawatts »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

I used to use it when I was at University and I kept a copy around for nostalgic reasons. Once in a blue moon I get an excuse to use it for work related reasons, and then I gleefully spin it up just so I can pretend to be a real mathematician / scientist type person. Generally this is superfluous, but I do it anyway, otherwise my tertiary education feels like a waste of time and money.

Other times I use it as a replacement for a calculator app, which feels exactly like cracking a walnut with a 500-ton industrial press.

It does have some reasonably unique capabilities that I did use more heavily in the past. E.g.:

- Simplifying the vector/matrix mathematics used in 3D graphics. It can eliminate redundant expressions, which is especially useful when you know that some of the inputs are constants such as 0 or 1.

- Non-linear curve fitting. If you have some complicated mathematical model you want to fit to noisy data, Mathematica will "just do it". With every other tool out there, this is... sss... hard.

- It missed the AI boat, but it has mostly caught up and could now be a viable alternative to the Python-based AI ecosystem, especially for certain areas of research.

- Complicated plotting requirements where I just can't be bothered spinning up some dedicated log analytics "tool" or subscribing to a "cloud service" and learning an entire query language just to draw a 3D histogram or whatever.

Re: Mathematica 14

#14

Post by Zambyte »

adamnemecek wrote: post #6
rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

Symbolic computation. Yeah, I guess you can do it in SymPy, but it's more painful. It's a really pleasant environment for certain type of work. The only thing missing is better type systems.

How does it compare to Lisp for symbolic programming?

Re: Mathematica 14

#15

Post by aragilar »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

I've seen some people use it like you would use Matlab, R or Python (I wouldn't recommend it...), but it can (mostly) do symbolic stuff quite easily. I've seen it used in maths and physics, mostly by theorists. If you've made it part of your workflow, I suspect it's irreplaceable, but the best way to think about it is its one of those tools that gets used because the topic is small/bespoke enough that it's hard to build a replacement without having all the existing features (there a number of these in physics/engineering).

Its biggest flaw is how much it wants to act as a black box, which means when something goes wrong, or isn't exactly what you want, you spend more time trying to fix it than solving the original problem.

Re: Mathematica 14

#16

Post by kccqzy »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

I do.

I started using Mathematica in middle school and continued from there. My initial use case was simply double-checking I did my math homework correctly. A lot of Solve, DSolve, FindInstance, Reduce, FullSimplify, etc. I did a lot of plotting to visualize things: not just plotting functions of one variable, but parametric curves, inequalities, functions of multiple variables. When I studied linear algebra, I implemented Gaussian elimination myself as a learning exercise and I was very proud of it: the nice thing was that although the algorithm worked on matrices containing known numbers, it automatically worked for matrices containing unknowns thanks to its symbolic computation. When I studied basic image processing tasks like edge detection or the like, it was again of great help. When I got into personal investing, I did yet more calculations using the FinancialData function to retrieve financial time series and backtested many kinds of portfolio. When I got into trading options, it was of tremendous help to learn options from first principles, starting from the log-normal distributions, implementing Black–Scholes modeling, and then implemented the option greeks (delta, gamma, theta, etc) from scratch. Even as a regular software engineer, when I needed to work on algorithms, Mathematica is great help when I needed to do complexities analysis more sophisticated than interview-level big-O notations. I even used it as a SAT solver in a pinch, or a linear programming solver, when I knew there are other tools, but they won't be as nice as Mathematica or have higher learning curves than Mathematica's builtin documentation.

Re: Mathematica 14

#17

Post by wenc »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

I used a bit of Mathematica but settled on Waterloo Maple because it had a cheaper academic license. Mathematica has stronger algorithms than Maple (like cylindrical algebraic decomposition), but for what I was using it for, they were both equally capable.

I was working on mathematical models (large scale optimization). These are usually solved numerically, and in numerical mathematics, how you write an equation matters tremendously (for instance, the equality x/y = z is much worse than x = y * z for solvers especially if y is a variable that can take on 0 as a value because during iteration this might create a lot of NaNs in your Jacobian or Hessian matrices).

I was using symbolic math to find better (but mathematically equivalent) ways to pose equations that would be numerically expedient. One example is using Groebner bases to do the equivalent of Gaussian elimination on a system of polynomial, which produces a row-echelon form and has many nice properties.

Re: Mathematica 14

#18

Post by seanhunter »

throwup238 wrote: post #4
kjellsbells wrote: post #2

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the arc of intellectual history it defines a broad, new, computational paradigm for formalizing the world. I am in awe of what Wolfram achieved with Mathematica. And also the size of their ego.

I was honestly expecting Wolfram himself to have claimed the invention of LLMs or transformers, probably by saying it’s really a scaled up implementation of some other function in Mathematica.

Joking aside, he sort of implies this in his essay explaining GPT models[1]

    At some level this reminds one of the idea of universal computation (and my Principle of Computational Equivalence), but, as I’ll discuss later...
And his "Principle of Computational Equivalence" is [2]

    "There are various ways to state the Principle of Computational Equivalence, but probably the most general is just to say that almost all processes which are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication."
Which a cynic might say is mighty convenient, because this is non-specific enough that you can apply it to basically anything and say you invented it and/or it's equivalent to something you invented and if it doesn't quite fit, you can use the "various ways to state" clause to weasel-word your way into something which does.

I find Stephen Wolfram frustrating for this reason. Benoit Mandelbrot is another guy who constantly seems to claim he invented everything, eg the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (which Mandelbrot basically claims he invented because he gave Eugene Fama some advice about the price process for stocks when Fama was a PhD student even though Fama/French was after that and Mandelbrot's idea of the price process for stocks is very obviously and demonstrably wrong if you know about market microstructure and/or look at trade marketdata[3]).

[1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

[2] https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p716--outline-of-the-prin...

[3] At a microstructure level price movements are made up of individual trades which jump around wildly with gaps in both the time and price dimension, and it has a base level beyond which you can't "zoom in" any more- it isn't some kind of fractal scaling in time and/or volatility which is what Mandelbrot wants it to be.

Re: Mathematica 14

#19

Post by latkin »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

I use it for hobby tinkering, it's quite fun to play around with. Excellent documentation, best-in-class symbolic capabilities, great visualizations/charting, everything you need is in the box (no fussing with dependencies). And once you get the hang of it, you feel very crafty doing complex functional-style transformations with minimal code.

For example, my house experienced some flooding last year after exceptionally heavy rainfall. But how exceptional was it, really? I pulled out Mathematica and in a few minutes I had an interactive chart showing historical rainfall stats for my city over different time periods. The charting, interactivity, and weather APIs were all just built in.

Re: Mathematica 14

#20

Post by auggierose »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #5

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc. If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

It is a very integrated environment with access to lots of mathematical tools. It is just a very nice and polished tool. I often just start it up to use it as a calculator!
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