Introduction

Mathematica is a general computing environment, organizing many algorithmic, visualization, and user interface capabilities within a document-like user interface paradigm. It was originally conceived by Stephen Wolfram, developed by a team of mathematicians and programmers that he assembled and led, and it is sold by his company Wolfram Research of Champaign, Illinois.

Version 1.0 was released in 1988 and Mathematica.  It provides cross-platform support for a wide range of tasks such as giving computationally interactive presentations, a multifaceted language for data integration, graphics editing, and symbolic user interface construction. An organized index of its functionality can be found here.

It is a surprisingly powerful piece of software capable of doing virtually anything.  ie it will natively read FITs format images which can be interactively analysed, processed, measured and enhanced.

My aim is to use it during my Swinburne studies to outline and use as a trial and error tool to try to get a grip on the math behind Astrophysical science.  It's going to be far easier reading the math then entering the formula directly then interact with that formula rather than having to covert the formula to algorithms then enter it as code.  Given the basic level of my math skills, it could be a long time!

I will be producing various notebooks (and accompanying pdf's) to cover all the tools I run across and can use in my research work (or studies at Swinburne)