Software developers are at last beginning to respond to the initial hype over Stephen Wolfram’s revolutionary Mathematica software product that so excited IBM and Next Inc when it was first released back in the summer of 1988 (CI No 958). Applications built with the package were on display at the first Mathematica users and developers conference in Redwood City, California recently, reports Microbytes Daily, and include on-line calculus courseware, circuit analysis and structural engineering programs, and even a supercomputer application for applying gravitational theory. Publisher Addison Wesley claims to have sold 40,000 copies of Wolfram’s book on Mathematica and is even planning a quarterly journal. As well as IBM and NeXT machines, Mathematica now also runs on the Apple Macintosh, and on Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and DEC workstations, although the Notebook facility, which enables calculations, text and graphics to be integrated, works only on NeXT and Macintosh machines, at least until the completion of a Microsoft Windows version currently under development. Wolfram Research, based in Champaign, Illinois, is also working on MathLink, a product that aims to enable Mathematica to exchange data with other software packages, such as a spreadsheet or computer aided design package.
