Preface fip back to earlier sections in the book occasionally to fill in some missing details. The last chapter will show you how to add text and organize your Mathematica Notebooks so that they are more than mere scratch sheets for your calculations. If you are a student who plans to do mathematics homework with Mathematica, don't put off reading this chapter! Each chapter closes with a Quiz, and a Final Exam can be found at the end of the book. The Quiz and Exam questions vary from fairly easy to quite challenging. Try to do them yourself before looking at the answers! Jim Host Claremont. CA July, 2008
Preface xv flip back to earlier sections in the book occasionally to fill in some missing details. The last chapter will show you how to add text and organize your Mathematica Notebooks so that they are more than mere scratch sheets for your calculations. If you are a student who plans to do mathematics homework with Mathematica, don’t put off reading this chapter! Each chapter closes with a Quiz, and a Final Exam can be found at the end of the book. The Quiz and Exam questions vary from fairly easy to quite challenging. Try to do them yourself before looking at the answers! Jim Hoste Claremont, CA July, 2008
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A number of people have offered helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks are due to judith grabiner for several of the historical remarks in the book robey Fierro offered useful feedback when the project was just beginning. Paul Wellin from Wolfram Research shared some sample notebooks that were inspirational Judy Bass, at McGraw Hill, provided valuable guidance and support
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A number of people have offered helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks are due to Judith Grabiner for several of the historical remarks in the book. Robert Fierro offered useful feedback when the project was just beginning. Paul Wellin from Wolfram Research shared some sample notebooks that were inspirational. Judy Bass, at McGraw Hill, provided valuable guidance and support
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ChAPTER 1 Getting Started 1.1 Starting Mathematica When we start Mathematica a fresh window, or notebook, will open. This is where e will do all of our mathematical calculations and graphics. At the top of the window we see the title of the window, which initially is"untitled-1 "Later, when how to le, we can give a name to the file, and that will appear in the title bar of the window 1.2 Entering Expressions Let's do our first calculation! If we type 1+1 and then press Shift+Return (i.e hold down the Shift key and then the Return key) Mathematica computes the and places the answer on the next line in the window. This is called evaluating or entering the expression. The window now contains On Mac keyboards, Shift+Retum is the same as Enter. With either Windows or Mac OS, using the Return key
CHAPTER 1 Getting Started 1.1 Starting Mathematica When we start Mathematica a fresh window, or notebook, will open. This is where we will do all of our mathematical calculations and graphics. At the top of the window we see the title of the window, which initially is “untitled-1.” Later, when we see how to save our work as a file, we can give a name to the file, and that name will appear in the title bar of the window. 1.2 Entering Expressions Let’s do our first calculation! If we type 1+1 and then press Shift+Return (i.e., hold down the Shift key and then the Return key)1 Mathematica computes the sum and places the answer on the next line in the window. This is called evaluating or entering the expression. The window now contains 1On Mac keyboards, Shift+Return is the same as Enter. With either Windows or Mac OS, using the Return key will simply move the cursor to the next line, allowing us to type more