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.