Finding and setting values of symbols. Mathematica effectively stores all definitions you give as lists of transformation rules. When a particular symbol is encountered, the ...

Particularly when you use transformation rules, you often need to name pieces of patterns. An object like x_ stands for any expression, but gives the expression the name x. ...

There are many Mathematica packages that implement symbolic mathematical operations. Here are a few examples drawn from the standard set of packages distributed with ...

The Padé approximation is a rational function that can be thought of as a generalization of a Taylor polynomial. A rational function is the ratio of polynomials. Because ...

If you have a function defined in an external program, then what you need to do in order to make it possible to call the function from within Mathematica is to add ...

This constructs the sum ∑_(i=1)^7 (x^i)/(i) . You can leave out the lower limit if it is equal to 1. This makes i increase in steps of 2, so that only odd-numbered values are ...

If you have installed Mathematica in a location where multiple users can run it (for example, on a file server or multi-user machine), then you can set up systemwide defaults ...

The following simple commands allow you to test the installation of Mathematica. Running these commands does not guarantee that the installation was successful, but a failed ...

In any interactive session, Mathematica effectively operates in a loop. It waits for your input, processes the input, prints the result, then goes back to waiting for input ...

The notion of expressions is a crucial unifying principle in Mathematica. It is the fact that every object in Mathematica has the same underlying structure that makes it ...