Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/06/launching-version-15-of-wolfram-language-mathematica-built-in-useful-ai-lots-of-new-core-functionality/

by alok-g • 1 month ago

224 120 1 month ago

writings.stephenwolfram.com

Lucasoato• 1 month ago

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 conventions.

Joel_Mckay2• 1 month ago

Wolfram did have Visual Studio API integration at one point, and it was useful reducing algorithmic symbolic design complexity. However, it was mostly the academically controversial assumptions that Mathematica makes that undermined its credibility in many faculties.

For example, when digging into GNU Octave you will find many of its libraries were built on peer reviewed legacy code provably reproducible with prior aerospace published works.

The problem with closed source academic programs isn't features or even quality, but rather one of traceable Metrology and scientific rigor. =3

breezybottom• 1 month ago

Most scientific fields have no problem using SAS or STATA or other black box code. I don't think that explains Mathematica's problems.

orochimaaru• 1 month ago

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't have a matlab subscription. Octave saved me there since the syntax is similar.

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.

Also, a lot of things in industry gain traction first in academia (especially math tools). So unless academic traction is dealt with mathematica's headway in industry will remain limited. They are still a profitable company. So I'm guessing there are deep pocketed clients who purchase the tooling.

coliveira2• 1 month ago

Mathematica has a lot of clients in math and engineering. Traditionally these clients are not so concerned about software engineering issues you mention. What Mathematica offers also makes sense for small firms with a few engineers, because they can leverage their vast amount of ready to use functions and libraries. But I agree that for medium to large size companies it stops making sense.

kridsdale1• 1 month ago

The situation you’re describing is probably why Python is the defacto language of Machine Learning to this day.

alex7o2• 1 month ago

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

zipy124• 1 month ago

This problem is very visible in Physics with software such as COMSOL, which many papers use. The licenses are so crazy expensive, that verifying any paper is difficult.

noir1993• 24 days ago

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

coliveira2• 1 month ago

I'm aways surprised that there's no open source language that provides everything you get with Wolfram language. For example, the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition. It is like having a mix of APL, Lisp, and Prolog that is very productive to use.

raegis2• 1 month ago

"...the level of pattern matching you can use when defining functions, as well as the high level of functional composition..."

This sounds like your average functional programming language. The Scicloj community is the first thing to come to mind (but I assume they don't do symbolic algebra/calculus like Mathematica does), but I don't know what you're specifically missing.

nextaccountic2• 1 month ago

Wolfram language is the easy part to implement

Its standard library is almost impossible to reproduce in its enterity

If those libraries were like regular code that got published to Github or something like that.. like pypi or npm or crates.io or whatever. And if mathematica had a lean standard library. It would be very feasible to implement a clone that's basically compatible

I mean. Depending on just wolfram rather than random open source contributors has benefits, for example it's more resistant to supply chain attacks. Indeed the npm model is not good. But, it is open, and that's what enabled for example deno and bun to have some compatibility with node

zozbot2343• 1 month ago

From a strict PL perspective, the Wolfram/Mathematica language is rather based on a term rewriting paradigm. The languages Maude, Pure and TXL would be examples of something that's broadly comparable but more generic. In general, it turns out to be a fairly niche paradigm that's not very useful outside of symbolic computing itself, or related fields such as modeling of PL syntax and compiler internals.

jmusall• 1 month ago

There is Mathics: https://mathics.org/

It doesn't cover the full standard library of Mathematica but the syntax is very similar and a lot of functionality is there.

TheRealPomax• 1 month ago

IT doesn't even need to be open source, a walled garden that you can afford is perfectly fine. Someone's going to find the cracks in the wall anyway.

But a walled garden that costs $400 for personal use (we're ignoring yearly licensing, because f that noise) is utter nonsense, and the clearest sign you have no idea how to sell and then upsell products to users over the course of several years.

brudgers• 1 month ago

Wolfram is $4000/seat for a perpetual commercial license with support. [1] $4000 will only buy a middling Mac Tool tool chest…and not the tools to put in it.

[1] a personal perpetual license is only $400.

nwatson• 1 month ago

Cost goes down significantly for subsequent years personal. Currently at less than $200 yearly.

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

Do they still offer a free license on Raspberry Pi?

geor9e• 1 month ago

I loved Mathematica. I was so sad about having to use Python math packages in industry.

alok-g4• 1 month ago

Here are some alternatives (some internally use free Wolfram engine):

Reimplementation in Rust: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

WLJS Notebook: https://wljs.io

VS Code extension: https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook

IshKebab2• 1 month ago

Reimplementation in Rust

It's so disappointing to see CLAUDE.md in projects like these. Basically rules it out for serious use.

srean3• 1 month ago

There is also SageMath and Mathics. Not replacements but close.

amelius• 1 month ago

True but on the other hand it is really impressive how Stephen Wolfram managed to build a viable company around scientific software.

gus_massa• 1 month ago

Impressive indeed, but it makes sense if you call it "Wolfram-Jupyter" and you notice the guy made it 20 years before it was cool.

jhbadger• 1 month ago

Basically he did it by developing the first version of Mathematica when he was a professor at the University of Illinois. They were not pleased (although they've settled since and Wolfram is still headquartered in Champaign-Urbana near the campus)

stblack• 1 month ago

I'm a huge fan of Mathematica; I've been a subscriber for many years. There's much to love about the product, but its AI assistant isn't among them.

Claude Caude is much better at Mathematica than Wolfram's own AI assistant. I think they flat-out acknowledge the very limited abilities of Mathematica's AI assistant in this version 15 announcement.

The Wolfram AI assistant is so bad I unsubscribed from it. By the sounds of it, a basic AI assistant is offered included with subscriptions now. I feel it's borderline criminal they were charging for their hallucinatory AI assistant in the past.

raincole• 1 month ago

Honestly I've found even Gemini Flash is better than Wolfram assistant...

But that's fine. Mathematica client supports openrouter as LLM provider anyway so we can use whatever we want.

SilverElfin• 1 month ago

Does anyone use this outside of college classes? It looks so great in these demos but I never hear of companies using it.

afolkest• 1 month ago

Not industry, but it's pretty popular among theoretical physics researchers.

jjtheblunt2• 1 month ago

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.

markgall2• 1 month ago

Still nowadays? My impression is that in (pure) math it's lost most of its market share in the last few years. But maybe that's only in my circles.

mackeye• 1 month ago

it has the nicest calculator syntax (imho) among the tools i've tried (python/julia/array langs/matlab/etc...) with extensive docs for each function and a nice notebook interface, but i've never written a program in it that was longer than one expression.

Postosuchus• 1 month ago

It used to be pretty popular for mathematical modeling in quantitative finance.

david_rugaex2• 1 month ago

I work in quantitative finance. I do the vast vast majority of my algebra and stochastic calculus in Mathematica, and lots of ad hoc data visualization.

alok-g4• 1 month ago

I have used at work a lot for some projects (device physics modeling stuff)

Vaslo• 1 month ago

I remember using it in my college days in the 90s.

People joining my company from academia usually know Mathematica along with Python or R.

When we tell them we don’t use Mathematica they are sometimes initially concerned. They are typically quite opinionated and I have yet to hear an employee complain about no longer having access to Mathematica. Or SPSS, SAS, or MiniTab for that matter.

electriclove• 1 month ago

What do you use at your company?

a-dub• 1 month ago

symbolic music features are interesting! they should add chroma!

sbrother• 1 month ago

I saw those and got excited; I've been using Mathematica for decades and do a lot of work with symbolic music.

Unfortunately they are extremely surface level in this release. It looks like there isn't even any ability to load/export MusicXML, kind of weird low level primitives and zero interesting higher level functions. Hopefully they keep iterating on it but I don't think it'll be useful for my workflow right now.

prenx4x2• 1 month ago

Hissab - https://hissab.io is a Free and opensource alternative to Wolfram

alok-g4• 1 month ago

Here are some other alternatives (some internally use free Wolfram engine):

Reimplementation in Rust: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

WLJS Notebook: https://wljs.io

VS Code extension: https://github.com/vanbaalon/wolfbook

bloaf3• 1 month ago

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.

ForceBru• 1 month ago

According to https://github.com/rawbytess/hissab, it's not even close to being an alternative to Wolfram. Hissab is described as "A strict, unit-aware natural-language calculator" and its syntax looks nothing like Wolfram. It reminds me of Wolfram Alpha, though.

prenx4x2• 1 month ago

Its not trying to achieve a feature parity with wolfram or mimic it. Its just an alternative to do calculations and may meet somewhere in the middle.

UltraSane4• 1 month ago

The mathematica solve function is a lot of fun to use.

everyone• 1 month ago

I just learned that Stephen Wolfram himself is a bit of a crank apparently. https://youtu.be/fO9iRDPXvT4?si=CbCjBtOSM5JhgYUF

lutusp2• 1 month ago

The linked video is a must-see -- it's one of those rare video essays that shed more light than heat.

Maro• 1 month ago

This is well known, old news.

I would not call him a crank, he's just an "independent physicist". He is a very successful and wealthy businessman thanks to Mathematica, with $100Ms of wealth presumably, and he choses to do physics in his own way, pursuing subjects that he finds interesting, in ways he finds interesting. And he writes about his work and himself in grandiose ways, usually comparing himself to Newton and Einstein.

Nothing major has come out of his research, other then one of his co-workers proving that one of the simple CAs is Turing complete.

Most academic physicists ignore him, but that's fine. Personally, I think we need more people like Wolfram who are doing totally independent research, with their own funds. Statistically, something unexpectedly good could come out of it!

His latest research subject is Ruliology:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliolog...

zozbot2343• 1 month ago

I would not call him a crank
And he writes about his work and himself in grandiose ways, usually comparing himself to Newton and Einstein ... Nothing major has come out of his research

okay

themafia3• 1 month ago

It's easy to find Wolfram tedious but I've not seem him be particularly disruptive to other efforts nor did his crankery lead to his current success. He's on the same level with Eric Weinstein. Your best bet is to ignore them.

mr_mitm• 1 month ago

I'd like to push back on that comparison. At least unlike Weinstein, Wolfram produced a genuinely impressive and useful piece of software, which empowers scientists and students worldwide. While his physics work is a little questionable and not too interesting, he doesn't seem to care too much what other people think. He'd never latch on to some podcast bro to give his ideas a wider reach. All Weinstein does is drop big names left and right and whine about how Big String Theory has taken over modern physics and suppresses free thinkers.

UltraSane4• 1 month ago

Wolfram is too smart to be a true crank, but his ego is even bigger than his IQ and he thinks he should rank up there with Newton and Einstein.

jmcqk6• 1 month ago

yeah he's not a crank, just an asshole. Taking credit for work did by his employees, to the point of suing them. The only significant discovery to come out of his CA work was completed by an employee, who wolfram sued when he published a paper and gave a talk on it.

steve1977• 1 month ago

I always compare the difference between Mathematica/Wolfram Language and Python to the difference between Classical Latin and English.

I don't really like English from a linguistic point of view (as a non-native speaker). It's a hodgepodge of other languages and has so many exceptions, it's not very elegant. But it's so ubiquitous and useful that one basically has to know English today.

On the other hand, Latin is beautiful and pure. There's more rules, but very few exceptions. But unless you study catholic theology or something along those lines, it's basically useless.

Which one maps to Wolfram Language and which one to Python is probably obviously.

gucci-on-fleek• 1 month ago

Which one maps to Wolfram Language and which one to Python is probably obviously.

I've programmed quite a bit with both Python and Mathematica, and I've read through your comment a few times, but I still can't figure out which is which. Both languages are hodgepodges of other languages with lots of special cases (which I would consider to be a good thing since it gives you so much flexibility).

schoen2• 1 month ago

Latin is beautiful, but its purity and regularity may be overstated because of its prestige.

There are irregular verbs, sometimes with complete suppletive replacement of principal parts by what used to be other verbs (e.g. sum, esse, fui, futurus; fero, ferre, tuli, latum). There are verbs that use passive forms with active meaning (deponents) or perfect forms with present meaning (defectives).

There are arguably completely missing forms in the verbal inflection system (the Romans knew that some forms plausibly "should" exist, especially based on a Greek grammatical model, but simply didn't have them!).

There is sometimes unpredictability in which noun case should be used with a particular verb.

The noun declensions are apparently based on two different sets of Indo-European noun inflection paradigms, so nouns with similar nominative forms can end up being declined very differently.

There are ambiguities where different noun forms coincide, which can even create parsing ambiguities in literature (like confusion between ablatives and datives, many of which look identical).

The extent to which the perfect stem of a verb can be predicted from the present is limited, as sometimes stem reduplication is used, but sometimes just suffixation of something like -vi.

There are loanwords, even classically, from Etruscan, Greek, and to a lesser extent other Mediterranean languages (just thinking of that "hodgepodge" issue).

The meanings of purpose clauses with the verbs of fearing are arguably backwards from the English point of view (although I think the Latin version does make plenty of sense).

Native and nonnative speakers couldn't easily agree in antiquity about whether vowel length should be contrastive and (I think) whether consonant aspiration was phonemic. I guess the native speakers' opinion should matter more, except there promptly became such huge numbers of non-native speakers that they started to have a really humongous influence on the language.

There are spelling changes even within the classical period, so there isn't quite one single classical Latin orthography.

I guess there are many fewer irregular verbs overall compared to Germanic languages (which historically have had up to hundreds of at least partly irregular verbs). But if we want to count unpredictability of Latin perfect stems (which is somewhat akin to the main source of irregularity in the Germanic verbs: stem changes) as a kind of irregularity, Latin will also have quite a lot of these.

seanhunter• 1 month ago

It’s a nice analogy but Latin has tons of weird idioms and exceptions. Been a while since I did it, but

1)the locative vs the ablative, and the locative only existing for a few words

2)the irregular verbs such as sum, eo etc, irregular nouns such as deus, aqua etc, and there’s a bunch of irregular like adjectives and stuff that I don’t remember

3)indeclinable nouns that just don’t decline at all and are the same in all cases. I think the word for “morning” is like this but it’s been a very long time. There are a few words that work this way anyway.

4) Words like “castrum” which just mean something totally different in the plural to the singular. “Castrum” means a fort, but the plural “castra” doesn’t mean many forts, it means a (singular) military camp.

5) Words like “Saturnalia” (festivals of Saturn) which only exist in the plural. As far as I know you can’t say one festival of Saturn in latin.

schoen2• 1 month ago

For (3), the word you're thinking of is "mane" 'in the morning', which looks very much like an ablative but which doesn't have any other forms. There are definitely other words like that, such as "fas" 'right, propriety, justice'.

For (5), these are called pluralia tantum (singular "plurale tantum").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurale_tantum

I gave some examples of Latin irregularities elsewhere in the thread, and I like your examples too!

sayamqazi• 1 month ago

Almost all languages have exceptions and traditional grammars are just academic study of grammars.

lutusp2• 1 month ago

If Stephen Wolfram really wanted wide adoption of Wolfram Language, he would give it an open-source license and release its source. As things stand it's an expensive walled garden whose costs outweigh its advantages.

A quote from the linked article: " ...year after year building an ever taller tower of ideas and technology ..."

That's an accurate description of the Wolfram empire -- every year it becomes a more expensive, less accessible, vertical tower. Meanwhile, people intent on disseminating useful knowledge do so by growing horizontally -- Python, Linux, many others, all open-source.

Historical figures would be astonished at what Wolfram is trying to do -- they would say, "Wait ... you can't patent mathematics!" No, but you can try.

david_rugaex2• 1 month ago

Obviously open source is a significant virtue. Mathematica has some strength in closed source, I doubt it could be as self consistent and backwards compatible if people could depend on the implementation as the use contract as opposed to the documentation. It would obviously have had more features earlier, but would that have made the perpetual support, cointegration, or documentation suffer? I'm not blind to the downsides, but I do perceive upsides, and those may contribute to Mathematica's niche.

mlpicker• 1 month ago

The AI assistant complaints track with what I see on my end. Any general model I throw Wolfram Language at does noticeably worse than it does on Python. That part isn't surprising. There just isn't much public Wolfram code to learn from next to the mountain of Python sitting on github. It keeps guessing function names that sound plausible but don't exist. Spent an afternoon last week fixing hallucinated options on an NDSolve call it gave me.

krackers2• 1 month ago

It keeps guessing function names that sound plausible but don't exist.

That's surprising considering how good their documentation is. A tool using LLM should have no problem with that. WolframLanguage is almost ideal for an LLM actually.

Iolaum• 1 month ago

LLM's learn by training on examples more than by training on documentation. Especially since examples are usually bigger in data size.

jrflowers2• 1 month ago

I like the changes they’ve made to the backend in the AI era because now if you input “weight of 1 cup of sugar” into WolframAlpha it says 202 grams and if you put in “weight of 1 cup of sucrose” it says 376 grams.

  I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it. - Harry Emerson Fosdick

scapp• 1 month ago

Hmmm, it could definitely be clearer. It looks like it's using the bulk density for "sugar" (so including the air between the crystals) and the actual density for "sucrose".

zamadatix2• 1 month ago

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...)

jrflowers2• 1 month ago

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

leephillips• 1 month ago

Scientists: better to stay away.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1023299/

exe34• 1 month ago

Dear diary, today I discovered Wolfram Mathematica 15.

Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15

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