The name is a little misleading though, as the later releases have shown Mathematica to be a great general symbolic manipulation program not just for, say, Calculus homework, but Wolfram had already used the name SMP, and the other options just didn't seem as catchy: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/internals/page5/3.ht...

Octave, Scilab and python driven C++ (e.g. Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software, ATLAS) can do just as good, if not the same or better. If you know what you are doing (which would be a must, anyway).

ps: Steven's book is full of spin, so I guess some of them would also make it to his website and vice-versa: this is called marketing and propaganda...

Perhaps a client-server version that does all its computing back at Wolfram's servers, would give them the confidence to dabble with a sane price point...

Who makes more money, Toyota or Rolls Royce?

I'd leave off the automotive comparison. Porsche is rich enough to contemplate buying Volkswagen.

There's plenty of cheap maths software (e.g. MathCad) and free (e.g. Sage, Octave) around.

Really? By definition? Was Erdos not a "researcher?"

Matlab quotes me $1900 for a single common license: http://www.mathworks.com/store/loginSubmitGuest.do while Mathematica is $1750: http://store.wolfram.com/view/app/mathematica/

How much does site license for Matlab cost you?

    ProteinData["A2M", "MoleculePlot"]

Try PyMOL - the most widely used molecular graphics software, probably.

I haven't used Mathematica 7 yet, but it looks like the tools it implements in one small library are decent substitutes for what's currently implemented in several big hairy bioinformatics toolchains. Look at how we operate now -- NCBI offers a bunch of free standalone tools; BioPerl and BioPython do some good glue, and then there are a bunch of visualization tools, and we FTP copies of whatever databases we need and keep updated manually. The extensible tools each have their own extension language, so a RasMol script won't load in PyMol (the tweaks, not the PDB file). Mathematica 7 appears to offer the basic components of this in one clean, well-organized standard library, controlled by one powerful language.

All that's great, but the especially interesting thing is their claim that the design of the whole system made all of this easy. The image-processing tricks and the unassuming Parallelize function seem like very specialized features, but they cobbled all of this together in, I guess, 2 years and some change, on top of a codebase that's almost 20 years old. It's like the anti-PHP -- brilliant design decisions all along that make adding new features easier, not harder. I have a feeling the Mathematica source code contains some very interesting ideas, and if it were open-source, it would be relatively easy to add additional features that seem like a big deal in existing tools.

Can Mathematica do raytracing, display secondary structure, semi-transparent molecular surface and allow you to select coloring patterns? Is it easy to predict protonation states of molecules at different pH levels and electrostatic potentials? Can it do molecular dynamics?

Who cares that they have built-in access to the melting point of caffeine?!

Click Plugin, then PDB Load; then type 1UBQ

I am very happy that Mathematica 7 ships with so much data. Data processing and procurement is a perpetual burden for those in chemistry, life science and environmental science. I'll be glad if this tax has somewhat lifted it.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ycombinator-StartupSchool

The talk is worth a read, but he doesn't give out any secrets to success ("work hard"), and note that the title of the talk is "On Starting a Long Term Company." It seems aimed at solving the problem of "How can I get the people, software, and money for my research?" rather than the problem of "How can I afford that ocean-front mansion and retire at 30?"

I have the feeling that if anything like the 'singularity' happens, it will feel fairly normal to the participants. There are many things today that would seem completely 'sci-fi' to people even a few decades ago. But we're still going to be resource and physics constrained, unless society changes our conscious enough that memes and genes won't still end up in an endless hunt for exponential growth.

If you want a qualitative shift in human existence you must create it. The singularity isn't going to save us any more then beneficent aliens will solve my problems by taking me on their ship to the planet of the sex goddesses to live in bliss in their zoo.

I bet you find lots of useful stuff trying for it. It still seems to me to be more a religious then scientific endeavor, but I'm glad you are working to prove loudmouths like me wrong.

http://wiki.sagemath.org/sage_mathematica

Mathematica just does some super cool things and encourages a different pattern of thought, which I'd love to play with.

(seriously though, I'm not a student. 2 credits at Johns Hopkins, right down the street, are about the same price as Mathematica)

"Note: Mathematica for Students is intended for students enrolled in accredited academic institutions and is for use on a student's own personal computer."

You might want to check if your campus has something similar set up. The Mathematica folks might be able to direct you to the right place.

How is it for Matlab stuff? Or perhaps it isn't for linear algebra at all?

Can you write real standalone applications in Mathematica or it is solely for prototyping, analyizng and modeling?