Software and Mathematics

Over the years a number of fantastic softwares have got into the
desktops and laptops of Mathematicians, Scientists and Engineers
and are helping them in a spectacular way.

Considering the progress made in almost all fields in last century
or so, it is natural that such progress was on line for Mathematical
Softwares. After all, the whole civilization depends on how correctly
we use our Mathematics

Two softwares just come first in this list: Mathematica and Matlab.

The speciality of Mathematica is in Symbolic manipulation. It's just
wonderful. If you type a simple command like
> Expand[(a+b)^2 ]
it gives answer
> a^2 + 2 a b + b^2
In 1970s perhaps no one imagined it would be possible to do such
things. Mathematica is brain child of Stefan Wolfram, that genius
graduate student from Caltech who later wrote that great book
"A New Kind of science" .

Matlab, on the other hand, came out of the brain of Jack Little who
was an undergraduate at MIT. Matlab is based on matrix
manipulation techniques and comes to be very handy tool for all
kinds of Technology-related studies.

For details about Mathematica go to www.wolfram.com
and for Matlab www.mathworks.com