Mathematica is a powerful computer algebra system with an intuitive graphical user interface. It provides extensive capabilities for both symbolic and numerical computation, as well as rich visualization tools for functions and data.

Mathematica's symbolic engine covers a broad range of mathematical operations, including simplification, factorization, and expansion; solving systems of equations (including non-linear); polynomial operations; differentiation and integration (partial and total, definite and indefinite); solution of ordinary and partial differential equations; power series (Taylor) expansion; limits and residues; and linear algebra including matrix operations such as inversion, transposition, determinants, eigenvalues, eigenvectors, QR and Schur decompositions.

Numerical calculations can be carried out with numbers of arbitrary magnitude and precision, giving users full control over rounding errors, enabling computations that would be impossible with standard scientific calculators or general-purpose programming languages. Supported methods include trigonometric and exponential functions, Bessel functions, hypergeometric functions, elliptic integrals, numerical integration, equation solving, polynomial interpolation and extrapolation, Fourier transformation, root finding, linear and non-linear optimization, and curve fitting.

All KIT students and staff have access to a campus license for the Mathematica software. The purchase of Mathematica is free of charge.
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Starting the program

Mathematica can be started under Unix or Linux with one of the following commands:

1. To start Mathematica with a graphical user interface, use the command mathematica
2. The Mathematica kernel, which provides the full functionality of Mathematica but not the graphical user interface, is started with the math command.

Under Windows, the program is started by activating the corresponding icon.

Providing the fonts required by Mathematica

Since Mathematica uses its own fonts to display mathematical symbols, you must ensure that the corresponding fonts can also be loaded from the X server on the workstation when Mathematica is started. If Mathematica is started directly on the local workstation, the fonts are generally available. However, if Mathematica is used on a remote computer on which you have logged in using ssh, for example, the X server on the workstation computer may not have access to the Mathematica fonts. In this case, Mathematica will issue an error message and you must ensure that the fonts are available locally.

You can find more information on installing fonts under Linux on the Mathematica website at
http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/FontsOnLinux.html

If Mathematica is to be used on a Unix/Linux workstation that is accessed from a PC running Windows via X-Win 32, it is best to install the Mathematica fonts locally on the PC. You can use the X-Config program to check whether the path to the Mathematica fonts is available.

Mathematica introductory courses

There are various introductions to Mathematica on the web, some of them in German, and collections of examples from various courses in which Mathematica was used. An incomplete selection is given in the following list:

• Mathematica course of the computer center of the University of Heidelberg
• Documents from the Mathematica Info Day on November 11, 2004
  • MMA5New.nb
  • newin5.nb
  • RechenBeispiel.nb
  • webMathematica2_Introduction.nb
  • JavaExample.nb

An introduction can be purchased from the ServiceDesk at a price of 4.30 € as a publication in the series of the Regional Computing Center for Lower Saxony/Leibniz University Hannover (RRZN): Mathematica - An Introduction, 7th unchanged edition, April 2012

The Mathematica help function contains a detailed description of the entire program package. As the documentation now comprises more than 10,000 pages, it is only available online. The main material is based on the book 'The MATHEMATICA Book' by Stephen Wolfram, the author of Mathematica and founder of Wolfram Research. In addition, many examples of Mathematica notebooks are available via the online help.

Further information from Wolfram Research

• Mathematica Documentation Center
  Online documentation with links to tutorials and examples on individual topics
• Mathematica Knowledge Base
  Answers to frequently asked questions
• Mathematica Learning Center
  Collection of Mathematica tutorials, examples, demos etc.
• Mathematica Community
  Links to various forums as well as news and events
• The Integrator
  Web interface for the use of Mathematica for the integration of functions

Further external sources of information on Mathematica

• Information on Mathematica from the German distributor Additive GmbH
• Mathematica in German-speaking countries by R. Mäder
  (Directory of distributors and publishers, registration for the mailing list of the German-speaking Mathematica User Group (DMUG), DMUG archive, German-language books on Mathematica, etc.)
• Newsgroup for Mathematica comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica