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Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had it in an engineering inner sanctum of Apple. had used it since it came out in 1988 on campus in Illinois, and folks in Apple definitely knew it. Not sure who all was doing what with it.

Steve Jobs and Stephen Wolfram were friends for years. Mathematica shipped preinstalled on early NeXT systems. SJ recommended some of the UI bits of the notebook. Particularly the separators between cells.

(Theo Gray is in there too; he built the notebook interface, was introduced by SJ to show it at some event. Theo's parents were math profs in Urbana and I studied under his dad one summer, house-sat, and I too had NeXTstep access and Mathematica since it was ubiquitous there)

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#122
post #110
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they stack up doing actual computer algebra things like symbolic integration? https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_integration_tests/reports... Note that alternative open source solvers like Fricas fail 10x the integrals in that corpus.

Rubi is just rule based integration. So its like looking up a book of integral formulas and encoding them as rules. It does mean you need a minimum number of other features like partial fraction decomposition, polynomial factoring so it demonstrates some capability. Many of the other Mathematica like CAS end up using the Rubi rules themselves. But indefinite integration is just a small aspect of CAS capabilities. Wha…

The same guy found Sympy was similarly far behind in differential equations (although Maple edges out Mathematica here):

https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_ode_tests/index.htm

He does a few other side-by-side comparisons but doesn't include open source engines in them.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#123
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but also for a one of piracy exists just use a cracked copy of it and be done with it

How do you run cracked/pirated copies of software? I stopped pirating software decades ago due to malware risks.

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Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI gave you as right a reasonable answer as could be made for the ambiguity of the questions, try asking why the answers are different when you thought they'd be the same (or check out a pre-AI answer https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/2fqyx... )

It’s not a big deal, it’s just the wrong tool for the job. “Sugar” and “table sugar” have different answers, inputting “sugar” and then clicking on “sugar, granulated“ answers 4.2 grams because that action causes it to start mixing up teaspoons and cups, etc. It is nice having all these extra answers, variety is the spice of life

Nothing to do with mixing up units (or even the back end), just plain ol' terrible UX/UI on the website. E.g., ask for "weight of 2 tsp of sugar" and then also click to set the type selector to "sugar, granulated". It'll still show the result as being for a query about 1 tsp of granulated sugar - but why?

This is because clicking the "granulated sugar" selection just appends an override string to the URL, turning the query into a very generic one for "weight of granulated sugar" using API style query semantics. The original input text is still rendered in the box because it was still left at the start of the query string and the override isn't in input text form to replace it. One can see the same result by directly putting "weight of granulated sugar" in the input box, where 1 tsp is just the default quantity used when generating examples with unspecified amounts for most ingredients.

If I were to guess, this was several independently made UX/UI decisions ("leave the originally structured input text in the box as modifiers are clicked", "have default quantities of a material to still generate an example result when a generic query is made", "suggest different types of material to work with", and "a dropdown to select the material should be a modifier") which made sense for isolated components but, later, the components were combined in this flow and nobody tested to see the aggregate behavior no longer makes any sense. Ironically, the issue would likely not exist if modifying the query for the new type was just given to LLM to figure out dynamically in the back end instead of trying to explicitly code the behaviors in the front end.

Wolfram product front ends have historically been broken in little wonky ways like this. Hell, they had a completely half-assed "dark mode" in Mathematica's GUI client until 2025 and just now have added actual visual themes to notebooks in 2026 - the attention tends to be given on the parts beneath the covers.

Re: Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

#125

I’ve used Mathematica at university, it’s so great! Creating fractals, animations and so on is so easy and intuitive. The problem though is that Wolfram is a walled garden. When you think about integrating it in an enterprise environment, you get hit by such high costs, it stops making sense. Imagine if they open sourced it, I feel like their products have so much utility, buried deep down Wolfram ecosystem and conve…

It doesn't make sense even for academia. Reproducibility is an issue and as we've seen with recent fraudulent claims in major publications - it's what is going to be used for verification of research. Many years back while in grad school I could not reproduce a result from a paper. Thankfully they had provided the data as public but not the code. I emailed the authors and got some matlab code back. My university didn…

> But with something like mathematica and the price of it you will never be able to have a wide verification of the result if the software is not free.

This is not strictly true. The Wolfram Language/Engine is free. You can run the code in the terminal or after connecting the kernel to Jupyter Notebook. The frontend Mathematica is not free.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/05/launching-today-...

https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframLanguageForJupyter

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