With today’s release of Mathematica 9, Wolfram is pushing the boundaries of usability, automation, data science, and a host of other fields with more than 400 new capabilities.

One highlight is the Wolfram Predictive Interface—a suite of features that intelligently suggests what to try next based on sophisticated heuristics and data from millions of Wolfram|Alpha queries.

“Even before 9, Mathematica was the broadest, deepest computation system in the world. And as scope increases, so do usability challenges,” says Conrad Wolfram, Director of Strategic Development. “Our new Predictive Interface really helps. Getting Mathematica to think ahead means not only newcomers but all Mathematica users can access its power far more effectively.”

Usability improvements are an important part of the company’s mission of empowerment through computation, but only one aspect of Mathematica 9’s improvements, which span many fields and technologies.

“Democratizing computation is one of our enduring missions,” says Wolfram. “We optimize what’s possible in each field, then empower specialists in other fields as well as consumers to harness it too.”

One such field is data science. Mathematica 9 supports this major emerging area with unique new functionality and automation. Analysis and visualization of statistical data and social networks (e.g. for Facebook, Twitter) is fully integrated with existing capabilities such as instant interactivity, computable documents, and symbolic computation.

“With Mathematica 9, we’re adding to an already powerful and rich computational environment, and continuing to integrate new areas with Mathematica‘s unique hybrid symbolic-numeric computation engine,” says Roger Germundsson, Director of Research & Development.

In all, Mathematica 9 adds or improves 57 application areas alongside many other features. Highlights include:

• The new Wolfram Predictive Interface, which dramatically improves navigation and discovery of Mathematica‘s functionality—part of Wolfram’s Compute-as-You-Think initiative
• New graph and network analysis, including built-in links for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more
• Highly integrated units support, including free-form linguistic entry, conversions, and dimensional consistency checking across graphics and numeric and symbolic calculations
• Major new data science, probability, and statistics functionality, including survival and reliability analysis, Markov chains, queueing theory, time series, and stochastic differential equations
• R language fully integrated into Mathematica workflow for seamless data and code exchange
• 3D volumetric image processing and out-of-core technology that scales up performance to very large 2D and 3D images and video
• Integrated analog and digital signal processing

For a fuller description of new technologies, ideas, and directions from the creator ofMathematica, see CEO Stephen Wolfram’s blog post.

Availability

Mathematica 9 is available immediately for Windows XP/Vista/7/8, Mac OS X, and Linux x86. More product details are available on the Mathematica website.