Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!hstbme.mit.edu!sorensen From: sorensen@hstbme.mit.edu (A. Gregory Sorensen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Mathematica on the Mac Message-ID: <6121@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Date: 11 Jul 88 13:31:44 GMT References: <2412@mhuxt.UUCP> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: sorensen@hstbme.mit.edu.UUCP (A. Gregory Sorensen) Distribution: na Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 17 We've been using a beta version on the Mac for a while now, and the program, well, is still in beta stages. The earlier comments about RAM-hunger are definitely true. Especially if you like symbolic math. Our 2Mb MacII shuts right down when we try to invert a 4x4 matrix. We hope to get some more RAM to fix the problem. Also, Mathematica is not as smart as we were hoping. For example, to invert a rotation matrix by hand, one usually transposes and then takes the complex conjugate...But Mathematica fails to recognize things like sin^2 + cos^2 = 1 and things like that, and doesn't do the inversion properly unless you tell it that. For direct numerical evaluation, though, Mathmatica is fast. Does anyone know if the "real" version is shipping?