Mathematica home edition, finally. $300. | Hacker News Reader

Mathematica home edition, finally. $300.

wolfram.com

65 pointsherdrick35 comments

I own a very old student version of Mathematica, not that I can use it, since transferring it to a new machine was beyond my technical abilities, thanks to their copy protection.

At $300 I would buy it, even though I have no specific need, it is a great application.

But I'd hate to spend $300 and only be able to install it exactly once.

On a side note, the scrapbook of the company history is very interesting (a startup story beginning >20 years ago with one guy)...

http://www.wolfram.com/company/scrapbook/page02.html#1988_St...

Not in the UK tho, WTF!? I have been badgering Wolfram about this for years!

Yeah, I was really pleased when I saw the headline, and then - only for the US/Canadian market. :-( I'm guessing it has something to do with being able to identify whether a credit card is linked to a person or an organisation. Does anyone know the details of how that works?

Wolfram do have a UK presence tho', I've spoken to people in their office here (and have just emailed them about this). So there's no reason they couldn't do whatever checks they do here too.

I'm using Sage at home at the moment which is fairly impressive in its own right, but it's not the same. Check it out: http://www.sagemath.org/

Actually, if you could email info@wolfram.co.uk about this maybe we could convince them there's sufficient demand for it.

how is Mathematica compared to Matlab? As I understand Mathematica is for all kinds of math while Matlab is basically only matrix and linear algebra-stuff(with a lot of libraries for applications of that).

Is Mathematica as good as Matlab for linear algebra?

Matlab is good at prototyping what one might actually build in another language. Its basically a regular python like language that has lots of built-ins for doing stuff with vectors and matrices and plotting things nicely.

Mathematica on the other hand is more of a tool for doing things symbolically (x's & y's). You can integrate, differentiate, find roots, etc all symbolically. It does have tools for doing numerical integrations and such, but they are much more of a black box than matlab's and are very hard to port out of mathematica. Some math folks don't like mathematica because of its black-box attitude, which is understandable. I use it sometimes for calculus.

Don't do linear algebra with mathematica. Matlab is waaay better at it.

for plotting, matlab is a bit 'lower level' where you map a function over a range and then plot the list of return values

for linear algebra, matlab is more succinct, it has "'" transpose and "^-1" for inverse, so you can type x = A'(AA')^-1*b

You can do that in Mathematica, too: http://documents.wolfram.com/mathematica/functions/Transpose

Mathematica has an extensive set of typesetting shortcuts. You just need to know where to look.

I used Mathematica extensively for my physics Ph.D. at Caltech (the same degree and school as Stephen Wolfram---though he finished in two years at the age of 20, instead of six at 29...) I've only used MATLAB sparingly, so I'm can't offer much of a comparison, but Mathematica is excellent at linear algebra: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/MatricesAndLi...

I dumped Mathematica many, many years ago when they turned evil and started making it stop working after a month if you haven't registered it.

What did you switch to?

I was trying to avoid reading Hacker News more than once a day but I was glad I saw this on my second visit! :)

Can someone please make a joke about a new kind of science or how celluar automata solves every problem in every field? (I couldn't think of any)

But seriously, what can I do with mathematica? Should I buy this?

Mathematica is a very powerful Lisp-based programming language(without user-visible s-expressions). It is (to an extent) designed for numerical/symbolic math; there are a lot of libraries available for that.

However, they've added a lot of other libraries, for things like image processing, etc.

It is a very powerful system, however somewhat limited by poor market penetration (nothing else uses it, so only people with Mathematica could use it).

A friend of mine who's a physicist claims that he's so used to Mathematica that he uses it for everyday scripting tasks, the way other people use Tcl or Perl.

I came across a web page made in mathematica once...

Yeah - I met a chap at an openbase conference in 2005 that was using it for professional web-application development. I've been intrigued by the idea ever since. I'd be interested to hear more stories from people who really leverage it like this.

I use mathematica for general scripting tasks. It takes a little hackery to do things like use it in a pipeline and such: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves/mash/mash.pl

All Wolfram's own web stuff is done in Mathematica.

There's a free Mathematica player that lets you run but not edit.

Can you do all the image/signal processing stuff with the home edition? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382986

The answer is right there on the linked page.

Q: How is Mathematica Home Edition different from the professional version of Mathematica?

Mathematica Home Edition is a fully functional version of Mathematica Professional with the same features.

I'm sorry, I'm probably missing the point. Why is it the same product with the same features but with a different name?

It's released to a specialized submarket of all Mathematica users (namely those who are paying out of pocket and who want to save money). That's called price discrimination, and it also exists among the submarkets of students shopping for colleges to attend.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/12/moving-toward-perfect...

The problem with Mathematica for serious development is that you need Mathematica to run the stuff. So if you write a gadget/utility, only people with Mathematica can run it.

This is an attempt to get deeper penetration into the hobbyist market.

You can freely distribute your UI-based 'gadgets' and what not using Mathematica Player, which is a free download. http://www.wolfram.com/products/player/

Why is it the same product with the same features but with a different name?

Price discrimination* (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination) is profitable if you can pull it off.

*Don't let the scary name put you off; everyone price discriminates if they can. The best price discriminators in the world are American universities.

sweet! Now I need a project so I can put my money where my mouth is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369109

I'm enjoying working through http://www.amazon.com/Illustrating-Evolutionary-Computation-... .

Doesn't the Mathematica for the Classroom version have additional notebooks that produce classroom handouts conveniently? I see that it has an even lower price for eligible teachers.

"We are sorry, but this item is not currently available for your region."

My region is Northern California. Hmmm...

Are you proxied?

Great price compared to the Pro edition. How does Mathematica compare with R for statistics?

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