October 16, 1999–In their recent review, the leading Swedish technical journal Ny Teknik (New Technology in English) found Mathematica 4 to be “impressive and fast” and gave the technical computing program five stars, their highest rating. According to Daniel Frost, the Ny Teknik test pilot, “Mathematics on a computer becomes beautiful in Mathematica.”

“The programmability together with the capacity in Mathematica means that there really are no limits to what can be done….The program covers the whole distance from idea to visualization to simulation,” says Frost, referring to Mathematica’s built-in programming language and the ability to interface with both the kernel, where the “heavy logic” sits, and the front end, the graphical user interface and interpreter “that sits between the kernel and the user.”

The reviewer was most impressed with the ways in which Mathematica has been optimized, its much faster speed in doing pure numeric analysis, and its ability to do simulations. “The increased numerics performance means that you don’t need a dedicated program for simulations, but this works just fine to run them in Mathematica.”

Another new feature of Mathematica mentioned in the Ny Teknik review is the ability to save and export documents directly into many different standard formats, including HTML, MathML, TeX, and LaTeX. “The increased capabilities for creating web documents and numeric performance enhancements together with the already excellent word processing features means that it is in fact enough with just Mathematica for document creation.”

Overall, Ny Teknik said, “It is hard not to be impressed by this program….a very solid package with good expansion capabilities.”

See the complete Swedish review in Ny Teknik 1999 (40).