Abstract

The software ‘Wolfram Mathematica’ is a very powerful computer-algebra system with the significant downside that it is proprietary and commercial. In fact, access to it is expensive and heavily guarded, such that only few schools provide campus licenses and even run-only players or cloud options remain not really available or hardly useful, giving it a fairly antique flavor. Once you get over this nuisance, Mathematica can be extremely helpful and actually fun to use for a wide range of mathematics and computational science, from symbolic manipulation, visualization, and interactive math, to rapid prototyping of algorithms, and numerical methods for partial differential equations.

In this online presentation we will give a concise introduction into the basic usage of Mathematica, its data structures and syntax, and go through concrete examples of case studies. The Mathematica notebook used in the course will be distributed at the beginning so everybody can try things out as we go.

Students of EDDy are encouraged to ask for a free Mathematica license+download at office@acom.rwth-aachen.de to have their own installation ready. All others are invited to download an official trial version or simply watch.

Link to Zoom room:

https://rwth.zoom.us/j/99255902507?pwd=TEp3c2VEekd0YTZxaG5IZHpWMjRHQT09