Mathematica 9 Is Released Today

As a heavy user of both, my experience is that Mathematica is more difficult initially when writing your code, but is ultimately easier than Excel because the thing you would be doing in Mathematica would be very hard to do in Excel (it is both a technical as well as maintenance nightmare).

27182818284• 14 years ago

>Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source.

That's what Google's Brin was working on when he interned there.

jkn2• 14 years ago

Sergey Brin was only working on open sourcing the "pure language" part of it [1].

I share the dream of an open source Mathematica. It's so rich, elegant and powerful, using it would be a no-brainer. But in its present state? Nope. I've been bitten too many times by the proprietary nature of Matlab, in which I have invested a lot of work, to repeat the mistake. More specifically and from the top of my mind, I found that proprietary means:

  - I cannot run my code on my personal PC
  - some people I'm collaborating with cannot use my work
  - when I move to a different job, there is a good chance I cannot reuse my code
  - even when my new workstation (or my colleague's PC) does have the software installed, there is a good chance the version is incompatible with my code or the license doesn't include some toolbox I'm using
  - some work I want to make freely available is of no use to someone who cannot afford the software

Notably absent from the list is the notion that I cannot check what is happening in the proprietary code. That is because the Matlab functions I needed to check were written in Matlab and perfectly readable. I'm sure the issue is real though, and I would be concerned if a new kind of science developed that produced results through opaque processes in closed source proprietary software.

[1] http://www.bestofama.com/Stephen_Wolfram/qisot

spitfire2• 14 years ago

The basic language is the easy bit. I've gotten the itch and written a sort-of-mathematica interpreter twice now.

Each time I've gotten to the point where I can do basic derivatives/integrals/polynomials/etc and realized the real power is in the huge library (and brain trust behind that library) available to you.

It really is quite enlightening to come back to other languages. It feels like you're going back to tin can and string communications.

I am incredibly excited about the improvements for operations research markov chains and queueing, as well as timeseries. These will simplify my code hugely, better yet speed up work.

JulianMorrison• 14 years ago

http://julialang.org/ has potential.

onan_barbarian• 14 years ago

> Sigh. I dream of Mathematica being open source.

I dream of a world where people don't compulsively fantasize that for any given piece of software, it should be supplanted by some other piece of software whose main differentiating feature is that it's a FOSS clone.

zackzackzack2• 14 years ago

I have no problem shelling out the money for the (student) license. I've worked at Wolfram and I could probably swing a free license anyway. There are already a variety of clones out there that can do some of what Mathematica already does. d3 and javascript can replicate some of the manipulate work. I mean, look at session: https://github.com/kovasb/session

Mathematica being open source would mean that I could look at the source though and see what the hell is going on inside. I'd love to see how they are doing call outs to R and trace through all the interactions between the kernel, the user interface, and W|A. If it were open source, I could see the implementations of all the Mathematical algorithms and look at all the neat optimizations and new results they have found during their work. I care about the "math in Mathematica and am interested in seeing how it all works.

ivanb3• 14 years ago

For me this software project is one of the most admirable. The combination of the quality, expressiveness of the language, uniformity of the environment, cool algorithms and rich visualizations is a geek's delight. It is a pity that since I finished my university there is almost no place for this beautiful software project in my day to day life.

ksss2• 14 years ago

Same for me. Most people in business around me use Excel and Matlab. I'd like to know how people on HNews use Mathematica.

EDIT: Mathematica can do almost anything, but how do you use it actually in your work environment?

cschmidt• 14 years ago

I use it mostly for exploratory data analysis. I'm pretty quick with making plots in it (I've used it since v1.2), so I tend to use it for reading in a data set, and them playing around with it. It can handle datasets in the hundreds of thousands of points (still in memory) pretty quickly. You can plot 200k points a series without it slowing down.

On those rare occasions I need to solve equations or do some calculus, there's nothing better.

onedognight• 14 years ago

Me too. I still use it quite frequently. One example where I've used it many times is to debug encryption algorithms. Mathematica can usually handle the most natural form of the Algorithm allowing you to compare the results with optimized low level code.

montecarl• 14 years ago

I typically use Mathematica to prototype ideas. When they pan out, I integrate them with existing code written in c or Python. That Mathematica excels at symbolic manipulation as well as numerical solutions while having excellent visualization tools makes it invaluable.

In particular I love to build up some complicated function of many variables and wrap a Plot[] command in a Manipulate[] command so that I can drag the slider bars around and see how the shape of the function changes. This allow for me to get an intuitive understanding of the problem.

alok-g4• 14 years ago

Given symbolic manipulation, Mathematica allows you to frame your problem without stating how to solve it, even though it would nearly always need some help. I often do the math by hand anyways beforehand for the purpose and to understand what is going on, but Mathematica subsequently allows automating and easier maintenance.

While this could be an extensive debate, I prefer Mathematica to Matlab whenever there is an option. I am a heavy user of both, though have never used Symbolic toolbox in Matlab. It starts a lot more complex in Mathematica, but becomes significantly more powerful shortly thereafter.

scrumper4• 14 years ago

MMA is a fantastic bit of software. It's my secret weapon for lots of tasks, including prototyping algorithms, data manipulation (it absolutely excels at this), visualisation and all sorts of miscellaneous investigatory tasks. I'd love to use it at work but as a Home Edition user my license prohibits this. Were I to accidentally start it at my day job, I'd use it for converting data between various formats, processing it, manipulating it and writing it back again, like a gigantic and insanely powerful interactive awk replacement. Since I maxed out the RAM on my laptop I now have it run at startup so it's always there for back-of-the-envelope stuff.

I used it extensively in designing my side project synth[1], where I used its visualisation capabilities to figure out everything from panning algorithms to delay lines. It earned its keep most often late at night when I was tired and trying to figure out daytime-simple-but-nighttime-hard routines. The Manipulate[] function is really good for this, as it shows you the output of a function as you drag the inputs up and down. I also used it for turning mathematical formulae into C code - the CForm[] function does this very well.

It's also a great way to experiment with functional programming, since that's how it mostly likes to operate.

I reckon there's a lot of places you could use it, but it's too expensive to justify. I don't really care if it's open source or not, but I'd like Stephen Wolfram to have an epiphany on pricing and realise he could sell ten times as many Home Edition copies at a quarter of the price. Its adoption is absolutely held up by its sky high price.

Anyone with further interest in it should check out the Wolfram blog[2] and one of the friendliest StackExchange communities out there[3]

[1]http://www.omnivoresoft.com [2]http://blog.wolfram.com [3]http://mathematica.stackexchange.com

east2west• 14 years ago

You make it sound like MMA is better than Matlab for even numerical work. Is this true? For example, would machine learning algorithms be better code in MMA than Matlab? Matlab right now dominates engineering and in particular machine learning.

Osmium9• 14 years ago

Agreed. Wouldn't it be lovely if it were pre-installed on Macs, so more people had access to it? I'm sure Apple could afford it, and they share a lot of history (wasn't Mathematica pre-installed on Next machines? I know Jobs came up with the name at least).

PieSquared• 14 years ago

Wow. I am impressed not only by the new features, but also by that blog post. That was some really effective marketing!

I'm particularly pleased by the addition of units. I can't count the number of times I've done some symbolic work in Mathematica, copied the results, pasted them into WolframAlpha, added numeric values and units, and then computed the value there. It's become a common refrain in my workflow and a rather annoying one at that, so I'm really glad they're integrating things from WA into real Mathematica.

Osmium9• 14 years ago

Weren't units already in Mathematica 8? http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/Units/guide/UnitsPa...

A lot of the new features fall short for me, e.g. face detection. Sure, it's nice to have over not having it at all, but when alternatives like OpenCV offer so much more functionality, why bother? I was trying to find an easy way to do facial landmark detection recently. If Mathematica included that by default, now that'd be a selling point.

Also misleading is their new "audio spectrogram" feature. Wasn't this already available with their FFT functions? An actual useful feature would be, e.g., automatic formant detection from voice files.

Often times, their new features list are just more nicely-packaged versions of existing features that in practice just save a line or two of code, rather than an feature that didn't exist at all before.

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

> Units

If you read the blog post you'll see that the units support before 9 was 'tacked on' as a separate package. The units in 9 are much more extensive and flexible, and more importantly are integrated with other functions at a deep level. To give an example, if you find a solution to an equation that involves units, the solution will possess the correct units (and so on for curve fitting, etc..).

> Face detection

Having used both Mathematica and OpenCV for image processing, I challenge you to explain exactly how OpenCV goes "far beyond" Mathematica. Particularly in morphological processing and image component measurements, Mathematica is quite far ahead of OpenCV (in fact, Mathematica bundles OpenCV to do some of its image processing). However, OpenCV does expose more lower level stuff, and comes with some ML and object detection routines that Mathematica doesn't yet have. But the maximum speed at which you can prototype new algorithms in OpenCV is pretty darn painful.

> Spectrogram

The audio spectrogram is certainly not tacked on. Even doing a Short Time Fourier Transform yourself is far from easy (it is not equivalent to an ordinary FFT). Making it performant on large audio samples also requires some subsampling smarts. And doing a correct wavelet spectrogram is highly non-trivial, because the feature size depends on the frequency -- i.e. low frequencies have lower time resolution than higher frequencies.

> No new content.

Look at this list:

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/SummaryOfNewF...

There's a massive amount of new algorithmic content there. You can't seriously claim that, say, symbolic calculation of antisymmetric tensors and continuous Markov processes are 'just convenient wrapping'.

Disclosure: I work at WRI, and love using Mathematica.

scottfr• 14 years ago

Anyone test it to see if it has reasonable undo/redo support yet?

That alone would almost be reason enough to upgrade.

scrumper4• 14 years ago

You're right, huge problem. At the very least I want to be able to undo/redo up to my last shift+enter.

Too• 14 years ago

Dito. This is a total show stopper. Only undoing your very last action and with no redo really sucks. I repeat that as it might sound like a joke to most people. There is no redo. And you can only undo one thing, where "one thing" might be typing a massive formula with all the correct mathematical notation or one full page of text.

So if you undo your last 5 minutes of work because you thought you would undo one line or something there is no way to get it back. T________T

If you deleting something inside that one thing you are currently typing, that deletion is also completely impossible to undo because if you do you will undo typing that entire block. (Undoing a small accidental delete is usually the cause of the scenario i described above)

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

Yeah, it kinda sucks -- mostly one learns to create new copies of definitions/code when doing substantial changes, which the notebook interface makes quite convenient. Or use a full blown editor like Eclipse.

The holy grail as I see it would be storing the entire edit history of the document as a git-like tree of modifications, which is entirely possible because Mathematica notebooks are themselves built out of Mathematica expressions (see for example Cell http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Cell.html). This would be similar to Rich Hickey's work on language-aware version control (http://blog.datomic.com/2012/10/codeq.html)

Osmium9• 14 years ago

I almost forgot about this. Can someone please explain why this is so hard to implement?

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

I think partly the reason is that the document model of notebooks is quite complicated. Each notebook is a hierarchy of Mathematica expressions (technically, the box versions of the original Mathematica expressions) and an associated set of cascading style sheets that tell the frontend how to format things. There are some nice advantages that stem from this meta-homoiconicity, but also some disadvantages.

One of these disadvantages is that editing the notebook does quite weird things to this hierarchy, like embedding new cells inside existing ones, merging cells, and changing mutable state in the frontend in various ways. Figuring out how to intelligently support multiple levels of undo without leading to rapid garbage generation and/or corruption is I imagine a Hard Problem.

For the record, another disadvantage is that source versioning and diffing is nigh on impossible (unless it takes place at a higher level, which is an interesting idea I think the company should pursue).

hxrts• 14 years ago

It's unfortunate that they restrict the number of cores according to license tier. I was excited about R integration, which is where I do a lot of parallel computations, until I realized this.

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

M won't run if your machine has more than a certain number of cores, or you'll only be able to fill a subset of them with M kernels? I suspect the number of cores available to the slave R process is unrestricted because it runs separately.

programnature• 14 years ago

I doubt that limit affects your use case. The limit is on the number of mathematica mathkernel processes, not on the number of processes the kernel calls out to. Though, it likely takes some fiddling to set up numerous R processes per mathematica mathkernel.

snprbob862• 14 years ago

Despite the overwhelming sense of ego that pervades every word Wolfram and his organization ever writes, you owe it to yourself to try Mathematica.

When I had first encountered Mathematica in college, I thought "this is neat", used it for a few calculations, and forgot about it. Fast forward to a few months ago and I decided to install a demo just to learn about term rewriting and pattern matching.

What I discovered blew my mind: It's just a lisp! Every expression has a "head", which is just a namespaced symbol. FullForm[x+y+z] is really just Plus[x,y,z] and Head[Plus[x,y,z]] is simply Plus. Squint, and it looks like (+ x y z) to me... The really interesting part is that the entire computational library is built around term rewriting. While there is mutable state, it exists almost primarily at the symbol definition level. Everything else is pretty much pattern matching on trees of symbols. Even the rendered output is just a drawn representation of a box-oriented markup built out of Mathematica forms. It's quite amazing.

bitwize• 14 years ago

Wasn't Wolfram the guy who said that Lisp was completely inadequate for mathematical computing, being too slow by a factor of 100 or summat?

Mathematica owes much of its lineage to Macsyma, a computer algebra system that really was Lisp on the inside; its spiritual descendant, Maxima, is written in CL.

snprbob862• 14 years ago

Wolfram seems to have a penchant for hyperbole. However, at the time, that was likely true. My understanding is that v1 of Mathematica really was just a rewrite of Macsyma in C.

tzs• 14 years ago

Source for the following: personal recollection from when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. I had a part time job as a systems programmer/admin at CITHEP (Caltech High Energy Physics), mostly dealing with their VAX-11/780, at the time that Wolfram was using that machine to develop the predecessor or Mathematica.

Wolfram and Chris Cole started developing a symbolic math system, which they named Symbolic Manipulation Program (SMP), when they found that Macsyma was unable to handle the computational needs for their physics research. For problems that they considered to be medium problems, Macsyma could do the work, but it was very slow. For problems that they considered to be large problems, Macsyma ran out of memory. Thus, they needed something more efficient in both time and space.

Wolfram and Cole planned on writing in C. They asked researchers in the symbolic computation community about this, and were told that it was a terrible idea. C was too low level. To do a high level system like a symbolic algebra system, you had to work at a much higher level. Using anything less than Lisp pretty much guaranteed your project would take forever.

Wolfram and Cole decided on C anyway. (BTW, C at CITHEP was not quite standard C. Norman Wilson had hacked the compiler to handle float and double expressions the same way FORTRAN handled them, making C almost as good as FORTRAN for numerical work, and C had mostly taken over from FORTRAN for physics computation there).

I recall seeing the factor of 100 number, or something like that, in one of the first public presentations of SMP. On the research problems that Wolfram and Cole considered to be medium sized, SMP was beating the Lisp-based systems by around a factor of 100.

vsbuffalo• 14 years ago

Lisp is too slow? I find this hard to believe. SBCL is incredibly fast, allows run-time compiling, and if you dig in the source, actually is partially written in assembly for speed. That's in part why Duncan Temple-Lang and Ross Ihaka suggested it as a base for a new R implementation a while back (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3726).

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

Yup, it's basically a LISP. And it has a kind of polymorphism (using UpValues) that makes it possible to do something akin to OOP. Here's the beginnings of a set implementation in Mathematica:

  SortedSet[x_List] := SortedSet @@ Union[x];
  SortedSet /: Plus[a_SortedSet, b_SortedSet] := Union[a, b];
  SortedSet /: Plus[a_SortedSet, Minus[b_SortedSet]] := Intersection[a, b];
  Format[set_SortedSet] := AngleBracket @@ set;

Now you can use + and - on these sorted sets, and they'll format in the frontend as SortedSet[Range[3]] -> <1, 2, 3>. And part indexing, MemberQ, FreeQ, and pattern matching will Just Work.

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

Things similar to lambda calculus, look like lambda calculus?

ustcscgy• 14 years ago

Well, there is a expression that mathematica can not Integrate[] it, but AXIOM can.

integrate((x/sqrt(x * x * x * x + 10 * x * x - 96 * x - 71)),x)

AXIOM is written in lisp and latex (literate programming), it's more powerful than MAXIMA.

scrumper4• 14 years ago

Mathematica is also by far the easiest language for solving Project Euler problems. There's almost a function call for each problem. It feels far too much like cheating but it's a good way to learn the language.

sn6uv2• 14 years ago

For those in search of a FOSS alternative, give Mathics a try: www.mathics.org

In the past couple of months, Mathics had made quite a lot of progress.In particular the upcoming release will run on PyPy. Obviously it still had lots of catching up to do, but being written in python (and some Mathematica) makes development easy and fast. Come join us!

Disclaimer: Mathics vice dictator here

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

http://www.mathics.net/ (try on-line) gives a 502

sn6uv2• 14 years ago

Apparently it couldn't withstand all the traffic from HN (potentially due to all the server side python). It's up again now.

You can always download it and try it locally: http://www.mathics.org

Edit: If anyone is interested in getting involved, we are always looking for contributers. The full code is on github: https://github.com/poeschko/Mathics

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

Mathics is pretty impressive. Nice work!

Osmium9• 14 years ago

Any news on if the OS X GUI is still Carbon-based? Was hoping the new version would be Retina-ready.

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

Yeah, I make noise about this all the time. Hopefully there is not too much legacy burden in switching to Cocoa.

HSO• 14 years ago

Try the "retinizer" utility: http://retinizer.mikelpr.com !

I used this to "retina-fy" Mathematica and it worked, the notebooks are clear now.

Osmium9• 14 years ago

Thanks Wolfram for not letting me upgrade. Website claims "up to 80% upgrade savings!" but when I enter my activation code, I'm told I'm not eligible.

I bought a 1-year license just a few months ago for version 8. Only £36, sure, but I'm a student and can't afford a second £36 now just for a handful of new features, even if they would be useful. Upgrade pricing would be nice. I'm sure working out a fair upgrade price shouldn't be too hard either. I bet there's even a formula for it somewhere...

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

Talk to customer support. I think they're pretty good about helping out students.

frozenport• 14 years ago

Is Mathematic customer driven? I see many baroque details, but I can't imagine them being used often. Graphs and parameters and models that look very specialized: but in many of these cases I know people use Matlab or C. I use Matlab. How does Steve choose which features to add?

taliesinb15• 14 years ago

On the contrary -- graphs (networks, not plots), statistical distributions, and random processes are everywhere in almost every industry. It is just that the current tools for working with them are currently so hyper-specialized to each individual field that they are 'ghettos' that most smart, general-purpose developers never enter.

We're all blind to things our current tools don't permit us to explore.

As a random example, I bet that many cloud-based services could (but probably don't) do reliability analysis of their services under different independence assumptions. Are the weak links what you thought they were? What if you updated your model as various things failed / rolled over, so that you could run to put out the fires that are most likely to burn the whole village down? For a modest organization a smart intern could probably put this together with Mathematica in a couple of weeks.

philip1209• 14 years ago

I maintain that my Mathematica license should include access to Wolfram Alpha Pro.

splicer• 14 years ago

The Wolfram Predictive Interface™ sounds a lot like Clippy.

stevenbedrick• 14 years ago

That was my first thought as well, but after playing around with it all afternoon, I'd say that I'm "cautiously optimistic". It's quite snappy, and they clearly put a lot of thought into optimizing what it shows and when. It would have been super-helpful when I was first getting started with MMA, and as an experienced user I'm finding myself using it more than I would have expected.

My one gripe thus far is that there isn't as much keyboard control over the prediction interface as I'd like, but that could just be that I haven't found the shortcuts yet.

One thing I quite like about it is that there's a built-in "feedback" feature- any time the "predictive UI bar" is showing, there's a button you can press to send semi-structured feedback about what's currently showing, suggest other things you'd like to appear in similar situations, and so on. I've used it already to suggest a few changes the prediction UI for ListPlot.

Mathematica 9 Is Released Today

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