Wolfram Research has announced the release of Mathematica 6, a major new version of their technical computing software for Mac OS X and other platforms. It costs $2,495 (upgrade costs will vary depending on your support level).
Mathematica is used by scientists, engineers, and others to perform a huge range of tasks, from simple calculations to supercomputing tasks. Wolfram bills the new version 6 release as the most important upgrade in the application’s 20-year history: The language and interface has been unified to improve the software’s automation of algorithmic computation, interactive manipulation and dynamic presentation.
Mathematica 6 features “instant interactivity:” It takes just about any concept and turns it into a fully interactive application, according to Wolfram. The developer has included more than 1,000 examples of the new interactive capabilities on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project Web site.
Wolfram counts nearly a thousand new computational and interface features in this new release, including language for integration of hundreds of standard data formats; load-on-demand curated data for math, physics, chemistry and other areas of specialty; symbolic interface construction used for instant creation of interfaces and more.
Mathematica 6 also integrates geometric computing, automates graph layout, manages combinatorial optimization and constrained nonlinear optimization, provides real-time code annotation and adds heaps of new documentation, both in the application and on the Web site.
System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.3 or later and a G4 or better (including Intel).