Key Technologies

What makes Mathematica unique is the host of innovative technology that underlies it. Year after year, Wolfram Research has led the technical computing field by engineering a more accurate, easier-to-use, and wider range of Mathematica functionality — achieving many world firsts along the way.

Some of the most sophisticated Mathematica technology isn't immediately apparent when you start out. It's under the surface — for example, choosing algorithms, checking precision, or formatting your output appropriately. Yet, Mathematica technology ensures that as the going gets tough, so does the margin by which Mathematica outperforms other systems — sometimes alone being able to deliver an accurate answer.

• Automatic Algorithm Selection
  With automatic algorithm selection, you choose the task you want performed, and Mathematica picks the best algorithm(s) for performing it.
• Notebook Document-Centered Interface
  Mathematica notebooks are today's most sophisticated manifestation of the document-centered approach to user interfaces and are a departure from the normal dialog box-based approach.
• Depth of Algorithmic Knowledge
  Mathematica contains thousands of functions covering many areas — numerical computation, symbolic computation, graphics, and general programming. Its collection of mathematical algorithms alone covers most published algorithms and also contains a significant number of proprietary algorithms.
• gigaNumerics
  gigaNumerics represents the unique set of Mathematica technologies that deliver high-speed numerical computations. Unlike dedicated numerical systems, Mathematica is known for its generality and accuracy checking.
• Symbolic Programming
  Mathematica is widely known as the world's most powerful system for technical computing. What is less widely known is that Mathematica is also a uniquely powerful programming language based on symbolic programming — the unifying idea that every element can be represented as a symbolic expression.
• Fully Interactive Math Typesetting
  Mathematical expressions are used in virtually every field from medicine to engineering to social policy research to economics and finance. Mathematica provides a robust, platform-independent file format that allows mixed text and graphics and that fully supports mathematical expressions embedded in both text and graphics.
• Symbolic XML
  XML has become the universal file format, and Mathematica is the ideal universal processing system for converting, analyzing, mining, or otherwise working with XML files.