* Seating for each class is limited to 35students. Registration is taken on a first-come first-serve basis. (Students on the wait list will be informed of seats as they become available).

Course Description

This course introduces the Mathematica package developed by Wolfram Research, Inc., which is installed on the ITS time sharing mainframe systems (UTS and WTS) as well as on stations in several computer labs around campus.  The intent of this introductory level course is to familiarize new users with the scope of Mathematica’s functionality, the mechanics of navigating through its graphical user interface (GUI), the means of importing and exporting data from and to external files,  the process of creating and working with numerical and symbolic variables,  the construction of Mathematica notebooks where text annotation is threaded with computation displays, the elementary ways to make simple plots and graphs of data, and the procedure for using Mathematica’s built-in help utility.

After completing this course, a new user should be able to:

• Launch the Mathematica application and use associated palettes
• Import/export data from/to external text files
• Create and manipulate content of Mathematica cells
• Construct mathematical objects and expressions in symbolic form
• Evaluate expressions in symbolic and numeric form
• Prepare a Mathematica notebook with threaded text and calculations
• Display functions and data in simple plots
• Use the built-in help documentation

Prerequisites: None, but prior experience with some other computational application such as Matlab or Maple would probably be helpful.

Length:  Three hours.