0. Schedule


Essex County College is a Mathematica Campus . . .


Mathematica is now at version 9.0! A short video will cover some improvements to look for. I'm upgrading my MacBook Air as soon it's available---I also want to encourage our faculty (including adjuncts) to consider installing a copy on their home computers. We've got installers for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

That means that we need to start using Mathematica in the teaching and learning process. Here's a nice video overview . . .



You may have an older version of Mathematica, and you should check to make suer that you're running Mathematica 9.  It's currently running on my MacBook Air and office iMac! ECC lab machines have also beed updated. 


Here is the top nine reasons of why Mathematica 9 is better:
  • Optimize your workflow with the Wolfram Predictive Interface:
  •  The Wolfram Predictive Interface makes it easy to find and use the power of Mathematica 9. The Input Assistant's context-sensitive autocompletion and dynamic highlighting help you discover and enter commands, and the next-computation Suggestions Bar offers optimized suggestions for what to do next. It's the next step in our ongoing Compute-as-You-Think initiative that began with free-form linguistic input. 
  • Examine social networks with built-in links to social media: Mathematica 9 introduces a full suite of social network analysis features including community detection, cohesive groups, and centrality measures, plus built-in links to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. It also adds new capabilities for network flows and new graph distributions.
  • Work with systemwide support for units: Mathematica 9 introduces a new unit system containing more than 4,500 different units, all integrated with Wolfram|Alpha's sophisticated unit interpretation system. From unit conversion to dimensional analysis, Mathematica provides you with all the tools you need to work with, and extract properties from, units and quantities.
  • Use survival analysis, random processes, and other expanded capabilities in data science and visualization: Mathematica offers more statistical distributions than any other system, including specialized coverage of finance, medicine, and engineering. Mathematica 9 adds survival and reliability analysis; full support for random processes including queues, time series, and stochastic differential equations; a complete set of customizable gauges for dashboards and reports; and systemwide support for automatic legends for plots and charts.
  • Integrate R code into your Mathematica workflow: Mathematica 9 offers built-in ways to integrate R code into your Mathematica workflow, allowing data exchange between Mathematica and R and execution of R code from within Mathematica. With RLink, R users can use thousands of functions from across the full Mathematica system.
  • Deploy interactive documents with enhanced capabilities: Instantly create documents in the Computable Document Format (CDF) to present interactive charts of results, show dynamic models, or prototype your next application, and deploy them to the web or desktop. With Mathematica Enterprise Edition, you can deploy CDFs with live data and other enhanced features.
  • Perform powerful 3D volumetric and out-of-core image processing: Mathematica 9 scales up performance to very large 2D- and 3D-volumetric images using out-of-core technology, and builds in a hardware-accelerated rendering engine for 3D images and volumes.Mathematica 9 also adds feature tracking, face detection, image enhancements, and other highly optimized algorithms to perform comprehensive image analysis.
  • Use integrated analog and digital signal processing: Filter and analyze sound, images, and multidimensional data with Mathematica 9's signal processing capabilities. Instantly design and deploy interactive filters and simulate them with WolframSystemModeler:
  • Visualize with new customizable gauges and built-in legends: Mathematica 9 adds a complete set of customizable interactive gauges for dashboards and reports, with built-in support for units. Systemwide support for automatic legends for plots and charts means legends with any style or layout can be added to arbitrary content.


In the right sidebar is an index of four Mathematica topics that may be covered (that depends on faculty demand) this academic year at Essex County College. All seminars will take place in room T212, and will start at 2:40 pm and end at 3:40 pm---don't worry, I won't drone on-and-on about this-and-that and you'll have a chance to try it yourself. Just use the "Seminars . . ." index in the right sidebar to see what we're going to eventually cover. And, please consider reading over this information whenever you want . . . these seminars don't need to be rigidly done in any particular way.

The seminars follow what I believe to be a logical sequence that is appropriate for the teaching staff at Essex County College. Your skills and interests may vary from what is presented, but you will nonetheless be presented with a possible approach to getting started with Mathematica, and more importantly, getting your students familiar with using Mathematica.