Mathematica Cookbook

Preface

Introduction

If you were stranded on a desert island with only your laptop (and presumably a large solar panel), what software would you want to have with you? For me the answer definitely includes the latest version of Wolfram Mathematica. Whether you are a scientist, engineer, or mathematician, a Wall Street quant, a statistician or programmer, or even an artist or musician, you will be a better one if you have this tool at your disposal. Of course, having a tool and knowing how to use it well are quite different things. That is why I wrote the Mathematica Cookbook.

I am a big fan of O’Reilly cookbooks, as these books are designed to help you solve real-world problems. Mathematica is an ideal candidate for a cookbook because it is so vast, deep, and full of traps for the novice. I was ecstatic to learn that O’Reilly was looking to publish a Mathematica cookbook and even more excited when I was chosen to be its author. I have been a user of Mathematica since version 3.0. Although that was over 13 years ago, I still remember the frustration of trying to solve problems in this system. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. The frustration a newbie experiences when trying to learn Mathematica comes from the knowledge that you are sitting in front of a highly advanced computational platform that eventually will magnify your productivity tenfold—if you can only wrap your mind around its unfamiliar idioms. If you are a new (or even not-so-new) user of Mathematica today, you are ...