Mathematica home edition, finally. $300.

[biohacker42]

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.

[babul]

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...

[gaius]

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

[demallien]

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?

[globalrev]

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?

[maximilian]

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.

[mhartl]

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...

[hs]

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

[glomek]

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.

[gaius]

What did you switch to?

[msie]

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

[tocomment]

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?

[likpok]

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).

[kcy]

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

[designtofly]

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.

[llimllib]

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

[henning]

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

[tokenadult]

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.

[FlorinAndrei]

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

My region is Northern California. Hmmm...

[icey]

Are you proxied?

[colgur]

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