Computing

1 July 1999 Version

This solid was drawn by Mathematica: inputs were the three-space coordinates of its corners, found by analytic geometry. Computer science knowledge: data structures, lists; was needed to work with Mathematica. Stephen Wolfram, Mathematica originator, began creating it at California Institute of Technology: it is subtitled "A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer."

An early mathematically-oriented interpretive computer language APL was begun as a Ph.D. dissertation by Kenneth Iverson. Improvements and additions to APL that Wolfram needed became Mathematica. APL language ideas appear in Iverson's paper "Notation as a Tool of Thought," Aug. 1980 Communications of the ACM.

Other special computing tools include gp. A UCLA Mathematics professor wrote "gp is part of pari-gp which is a number theory package developed originally by Henri Cohen and others of Bordeaux, France. It is in wide use by computational number theorists. You can get it from

http://hasse.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/ntsw/pari/ "

To view gp please click here. There are many mathematical tools available on the world wide web, e.g., Factoris an online factoring program by Xiao Gang.