It is available on a wide variety of systems, supports a huge range of operations, and features extensive layout and graphical capabilities.
The Mathematica system is comprised of a kernel, which does the computation with limited user intended output, that can work over a network, on a more powerful computer, for instance, whilst the frontend which comprises of a prettyprinter with a notebook metaphor, can be on any computer and use this external kernel if it so desired.
The frontend system processes input from a user in Mathematica code (see below for an example) and returns the output together with the input each in a cell (as does Maple). Having cells in this way also allows for outlining and sectioning of a document, referred to as a Mathematica notebook. Simple symbolic output can be prettyprinted or be presented back in a similar form to Mathematica code. More complex output such as images and graphs are presented as images in these cells.
Alternatives are the Maple (commercial) and Maxima (free, GPL).
Example Mathematica code
The following Mathematica sequence will find the determinant of the 6×6 matrix whose i, j'th entry contains ij with all zero entries replaced as 1.
In[1]:= Det[ReplaceAll[Table[i j, {i,0,5}, {j,0,5}],{0->1}]]
Out[1]:= 0So the determinant of such a matrix is 0.External links