Wolfram Research Updates Powerful Technical Computing System
May 10, 1999–On June 1, 1999, the Macintosh will become even more extraordinary. It’s the day that Wolfram Research will ship Mathematica 4, the latest version of its best-selling, award-winning technical computing system.
Mathematica makes the Macintosh a calculational powerhouse. It once took a roomful of “big iron” an entire day to calculate pi to a million digits; a stock iMac packing Mathematica 4 can compute the millionth digit of pi in just a few minutes. (That digit, by the way, is a 5.) Mathematica on the Mac can multiply million-element matrices in a flash or solve partial differential equations that would have taken Einstein an entire box of chalk.
Along with its hundreds of thousands of users in research and education, Mathematica has also earned an enthusiastic following among the key figures of the computer industry, who take advantage of Mathematica‘s intuitive, interactive programming language to prototype sophisticated algorithms.
Wolfram Research counts many Apple enthusiasts among its user base–and among its developers as well. Mathematica 4 for Macintosh isn’t stripped down or a generation behind; it offers all the power of the Mathematica 4 releases for Unix, Windows, and Linux. Mathematica‘s platform-independent .nb document format lets Mathematica users on the Mac share their results with users on Unix, Windows, and Linux computers–an extraordinary degree of cross-platform compatibility.
Key Improvements in Mathematica 4
- Extensive enhancements in speed and efficiency in numerical calculation
- Direct import and export from over 20 standard data, graphics, and sound file formats
- Spell checking and hyphenation in the notebook interface
- Extended HTML and TeX output capabilities
- Extended range and improved functions for data analysis
- Support for handling computations in specified algebraic domain
- Network license management availability on all platforms
- Enhancements to many built-in Mathematica functions