Mathematica is a state-of-the-art and powerful system for doing mathematics by computer. One can use Mathematica in many different ways, but in your calculus courses you will use only a small portion of its capabilities. (You will use more advanced features in your later course work and, very likely, in your professional career). The following tutorial sections will show you how to use to do numerical, symbolic and graphical calculations using Mathematica. You will get a sense of the graphical power in this tutorial.

One of the remarkable features of Mathematica is its "symbolic" capability; i.e. its ability to very quickly do complicated algebraic computations and simplifications. Such packages can thus save us many hours of (error-prone) work. Similarly, you will see later this semester that Mathematica is also very good at calculus operations (differentiation and integration). These time saving features will not take all the work out of a calculus course, rather they will allow us to probe more deeply into
central issues of the subject.


http://math.colgate.edu/mathlab/whatis.html
Revised: March 1, 1996.
Questions to: valente@colgate.edu
Copyright 1996 © Colgate University. All rights reserved.