https://community.wolfram.com RSS Feed for Wolfram Community showing questions tagged with Mathematica sorted by most replies. https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/181759 I was wondering, it would be interesting to try to use the community as a way to request new functions that could be incorporated into new versions of Wolfram Language, in a colaborative way. Sometimes users simply don't have the whole/deeper system view, to understand that the requested function is or too specific, too broad or already implemented, but I believe that another times we can have a nice insights, that Wolfram Research people haven't yet, or that do not have received much attention  yet.  To the idea is: [b]Post your's requested Function as a answer to this question, and let's upvotes show the more interesting ones![/b] Some rules 1- One Post per function (or class of function), you can have more than one request. 2- Exemplify your function use. Rodrigo Murta 2014-01-08T09:14:19Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/291612 Since about Version 6 it has taken longer and longer to start up Mathematica. In Version 10 on my HP Pavilion HPE Series it takes a little over a minute. Is this common experience? Is there some way to decrease this time? Does it have any thing to do with virus checking? I guess that one possible solution is to just leave the Mathematica FrontEnd open all the time, say by keeping the Documentation Center open but minimized. David J M Park Jr 2014-07-11T19:45:42Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2253852 I realize that I am possibly the only Mathematica user to suffer from existential angst for the product, but still, its worth pausing to ask the question, what is Mathematica for? Meaning, what is its purpose? But for those of you pragmatists tempted to roll your eyes and just get on with using it, let me motivate the question with a chart: ![enter image description here][1] You don't need a model to figure out the long term trend in that time series. And someone, somewhere, in WR needs to be asking the question I am posing in this post, if they are seriously hoping to check that trend and reverse it. Now, let's be fair here. Firstly this is not just a Mathematica issue. For example, here's the comparable chart for Matlab: ![enter image description here][2] So I am not "picking on" Mathematica. Its a general problem for mathematical programming languages. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, its a challenge for proprietary mathematical programming languages: ![enter image description here][3] Now this "analysis" is of course over-simplistic. It could be, for example, that the downward trend in Mathematica interest is a reflection of a decision by WR to increase prices over time, to maximize profits, i.e. it could conceivably be a *good* thing. But I rather suspect otherwise and instead tend to believe that Mathematica is losing influence and relevance, regardless of whatever I may think of the product. Another response might be: "Of course we are losing market share to license-free, direct competitor products. What's your point?". To which, I suppose, the answer might be: "Are you quite sure that is inevitable? Are there not examples of for-profit products that are so good they are able to maintain market share in the face of cost-free alternatives?". The answer to that question is, of course, yes. But in order to maintain your competitive position you have to be crystal clear in your understanding of what the value proposition is, and why customers will (continue to) pay for your product. Which brings me to the subject of this post: what is Mathematica for? Because unless can answer that question, you can't answer the earlier one. Now I have a theory that the generally held view in WR is that Mathematica is for any kind of programming task you can conceive of. It's a general purpose tool, limited in its capabilities only by your imagination. And at this point we could now queue up a 15 minute informercial featuring examples of applications from Astronomy to Zoology. But just because you *can* do something in Mathematica doesn't mean you should: there are often better alternatives. Mathematica has developed into something like a Swiss Army knife, a general purpose tool you can use for almost any purpose. But, often times what you need is a tool with a specific purpose, like a screwdriver, which will make it much easier to complete the task you have in mind. Let's take a simple example: spreadsheets. I have seen several attempts to get Mathematica to do the kind of thing that Excel can do effortlessly. And the question I always end up asking myself is: "why on God's green earth would anyone in their right mind try to use Mathematica for a task like that?". What is trivial to accomplish in a few seconds or minutes in Excel, typically takes hours of jumping through hoops with Mathematica to achieve a result that is almost always inferior. It's like trying to navigate a freeway in a spaceship, rather than a motor car. Sure, you can do it, buy why?? Another no-no is trying to develop stand-alone software applications in Mathematica. It's extremely hard to do - typically much tougher then using a language designed for that purpose. On the other hand, there are some things that Mathematica excels at, such as: - Mathematics/symbolic logic/symbolic manipulation: superb. Best of breed. - Graphics (including animation) ditto - Documentation. Also superb. Now as good at Matlab, possibly even superior. After that, you could pick a bunch of different application areas in which Mathematica is great. But best of breed? I dont know. Let's take an area I know a little about: time series analysis. prior to 2010, Mathematica was truly awful at handling time series. Basically it didn't. Gradually, over subsequent releases, Mathematica has made enormous strides in this area to the point where it is truly magnificent. For which someone at WL deserves (and I hope has received), several promotions. But despite this, Mathematica is still not best of breed in this area. Why? Because, unaccountably, it is still missing several vital elements of functionality such as Granger causality/ Cointegration and its implementation of important functionality like the Kalman Filter is horribly unintuitive. This shows two things: (i) it is possible for WR to make Mathematica outstanding in almost any area it chooses to. it's just a question of focus. And (ii) to become best of breed, you need to finish the job! By which I mean, provide something close to 99% of the functionality that a professional practitioner in that area would expect to have available. if it chose to, WR could accomplish that in the time series area in a single release, I would guess. The problem, I am suggesting, is that in trying to make Mathematica a product that is "all things to all men", it fails to achieve the status of being indispensable to practitioners in a more limited subset of subject areas. Ok let's go with this conjecture for a moment. Let's wave a magic wand and imagine that we can change Stephen Wolfram's vision about his flagship product, which he has sweated blood over for the last 20-30 years (in other words, this is never going to happen - but its still fun to play the game). What core capabilities would you have WR focus on with the aim of making Mathematica an indispensable product in that area? Here are my choices: (i) Time series & econometrics. Mathematica is so close: just finish the job - it's a no-brainer! (ii) Machine learning. This also means making sure that the GPU capability works as it should, first time and every time. Mathematica still has a way to go here and its a huge area. But I'm sure WR could do it. (iii). Meta-Programming. This one is a BIG stretch. But it just happens that WL may have a huge potential competitive advantage, because the language is itself *computational*. in other words, the building blocks of the language can themselves be manipulated, which is exactly what you need for meta-programming. Try doing that in Python! On this subject I would say that the starting point would be to create WL functionality capable of generating a single line of WL code that is sufficiently complex and interesting to win the Wolfram One-Liner competition. I realize that's a huge challenge and its not just about the difficulty of navigating the terrain of the Wolfram language. It also involves thinking about what "complex" and "interesting" mean, in this context. Think of this as a Turing test, for Metaprogramming capability. Once it's passed, it would open up a floodgate of possibilities, both for WL aficionados but also, critically, for those who don't program in WL, or indeed in any language at all. For reference, check out whats going on in the world of "no -code" application environments. [1]: https://community.wolfram.com//c/portal/getImageAttachment?filename=GoogleTrendsMathematica.png&userId=773999 [2]: https://community.wolfram.com//c/portal/getImageAttachment?filename=GoogleTrendsMatlab.png&userId=773999 [3]: https://community.wolfram.com//c/portal/getImageAttachment?filename=GoogletrendsPython.png&userId=773999 Jonathan Kinlay 2021-04-26T16:09:01Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/288532 I am doing some project planning that could use the CDF Player and CDF technology as a means of distributing a mathematical model to reviewers. However, I've noticed that the documentation for 9 is really for 8. There have been some indications that 10 is coming out with no changes to the documentation since version 8. There is no File | New | CDF (Free or Pro) is 9. The latest CDFs in CDF-Examples are from 2012. This raises a red flag that CDFs are no longer mainstream. Ideally we would like to use a technology that is supported and will stay current with Windows and Apple OS versions. I see that there is a CDF Export and Preview under the File menu. Some of the questions I will be asked by management are: 1. Is CDF considered a legacy technology? If not, will it be available in 10 and future versions - is there a roadmap that can be referenced? 2. If CDF is considered legacy, when do support options expire? 3. Are there any replacements planned from Wolfram that are functionally equivalent to CDFs? If so what are they? 4. What are runtime licensing considerations that should be honored if we use C and C++ as a front-end? CDFs offer an attractive solution - I love what I am seeing in the CDF-Examples - but before committing to CDFs we need to know that this technology is on-going and will stay current with Mathematica and operating systems. Doug Kimzey 2014-07-06T14:44:27Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2118125 Are there any benchmarks yet for Mathematica 12.1 on the new (13") M1 MacBook Air or (13") M1 MacBook Pro? Murray Eisenberg 2020-11-18T20:19:23Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/254781 Main function to create an ellipse:[mcode]a*x^2 + 2*b*x*y + c*y^2 + 2*d*x + 2*f*y + g[/mcode] How to add a condition in one function to the three equations:[mcode]\[CapitalDelta]=-c d^2 + 2 b d f - a f^2 - b^2 g + a c g J=-b^2 + a c I=a+c[/mcode] conditions: [mcode]\[CapitalDelta]!=0 J>0 \[CapitalDelta]/I<0[/mcode] And if we can do so that once the substitute number three equations? And maybe some random generator to the given numbers satisfy the above conditions. [mcode]\[CapitalDelta][a_, b_, c_, d_, f_, g_] := -c d^2 + 2 b d f - a f^2 - b^2 g + a c g J[a_, b_, c_] := -b^2 + a c i[a_, c_] := a + c ?[-2, 4, -6, 2, 1, 2][/mcode] Radek Drozd 2014-05-20T15:05:35Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/774416 I originally posted this on Stack Exchange, where it was suggested it would more appropriately be posted here. The only "real-world" application that meets the specified criteria offered so far (twice) has been Wolfram Alpha (I am not entirely sure that it meets the second criterion - would you choose to develop WA in WL, if you didn't have a bunch of WL experts and a WL development platform at your disposal?). In any event, I am interested in hearing about other real-life applications.... I have a theory, which I am in the process of writing about in a blog post, that other than in applications in mathematics (symbolic logic), Mathematica's primary usefulness is in encouraging a kind of intellectual dilettantism. (Of course, one man's dilettantism is another man's New Kind of Science: i.e. the speculative endeavors of a fertile, creative intellect might readily be mistaken for actual (scientific) achievement by less agile minds.) I don't want this conjecture to be true: I'm as much a buyer of the hype around Mathematica as the next man. But I have noticed that, in practice, Mathematica somehow fails to live up to its apparently unlimited potential for encapsulating creative thought-product across an almost unlimited span of human intellectual endeavor. In my own work in finance, for instance, it has generally proved much less useful than other products such as Matlab. And, in general, when I look at the examples cited by Wolfram in its "customer stories", my reaction to many of them is: "Sure, you can use Mathematica to do that. But why would you, when there are much better alternatives available?". To take one such customer story from the field of 3D CAD, I don't understand why anyone would *prefer* to use Mathematica for such a task, rather than a specialist product like Solidworks. I am aware of applications where the use of Mathematica is fully justified. In my own work, I have used Mathematica to price complex derivatives products, a field in which it excels. Likewise, I am somewhat familiar with Phil Zecker's work at EQA Partners, where he produced an outstanding risk management solution using Mathematica. In both these cases, however, there is no standard, specialized alternative offering in the field of risk management, as there are, for example, in engineering, CAD, app design, or music. In these areas, it seems to me, Mathematica is like a Swiss Army Knife: sure you can use it to dabble in almost anything; but I have screwdrivers, knives and corkscrews that do a better job for their specific purpose. In any event I am looking for counter-examples of real-world applications to refute my hypothesis about Mathematica. By "real-world" I mean specifically applications in which: (i) money changed hands (e.g. a commercial product was sold, or consulting fee earned) ; and (ii) an alternative solution was considered and Mathematica preferred for specific reasons ("it was the only software we could afford or that was available to tackle the job", is not a valid reason to qualify the application as real-world, according to this definition) Jonathan Kinlay 2016-01-17T16:05:55Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/817719 Dear All, I have a simple scene with some (non-transparent) cubes: ![enter image description here][1] While this motion was relatively fluent (10-20 fps I estimate) in version 10.1, 10.2, 10.3., 10.3.1, it is roughly 0.3 fps for me in version 10.4. Can someone else confirm this behavior? I've tried some of the different rendering engines to no avail. I've attached the notebook. I'm working on El Capitan with a Macbook pro Retina. [1]: http://community.wolfram.com//c/portal/getImageAttachment?filename=ScreenShot2016-03-04at14.27.04.png&userId=73716 Sander Huisman 2016-03-04T13:34:50Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1097940 Since 16 may 2017, why am I not able to get the price history of US stock market tickers? Please see output below! Has anything changed? In[9]:= FinancialData["GE", {{2017, 1, 3}, {2017, 5, 15}}] Out[9]= Missing["NotAvailable"] In[10]:= FinancialData["IBM", {{2017, 1, 3}, {2017, 5, 15}}] Out[10]= Missing["NotAvailable"] sridev ramaswamy 2017-05-18T12:09:48Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/221962 I would like to ask if I have a Mathematica code of a specific function and I need to use this code in Mathematica to get some values of this function, How Can I do this? I tried to copy the code into new notebook file but unfortunatelly it did not work Please help me to solve this problem, because I am new in using Mathematica Thanks in advanced  Hosam rh 2014-03-20T20:38:28Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1664758 Great to see Mathematica 12 released and I can't wait to try the new functionality! What is the timeline and roadmap to get Mathematica 12 to the Pi? – Thanks! Michael Byczkowski 2019-04-20T08:40:16Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1807709 Hello everybody! I wrote a number of notebooks calling R packages. But using up-to-date versions (Mathematica 12 and R 3.6.1), nothing works any more! For instance, it seems the default distribution doesn't exist now: In[2]:= InstallR[] REvaluate["sample(1:100,10)"] During evaluation of In[2]:= InstallR::invldrhome: The specified path to R home directory does not point to a valid directory Out[2]= $Failed I tried to use my own distribution, but it is not recognized! In[4]:= InstallR["RHomeLocation" -> "C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-36~1.1", "RVersion" -> "3.6.1"] During evaluation of In[5]:= InstallR::fail: Failed to install R. The following error was encountered: crash in low-level RLink component or in R runtime Out[5]= $Failed It seems there is an issue with the R.dll file (dll: 3.6.1, expecting 3.5.0). What can I do? Install an older version of R? Which one? Best regards, Claude Claude Mante 2019-10-15T09:19:47Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/458769 Hi All Maybe it's a silly question for experienced users, but I'm rather new and I'm having troubles. I need to know if there is a way to force Mathematica to work in the Reals domain. For example, if I do Plot[x^(1/3),{x,-10,10}] I obtain a plot only for positive reals, For negative ones Mathematica branches to a complex root and doesn't plot it. I know that in the past existed a package called RealOnly which did the job, but now it's obsolete. I tried several combinations of Assumptions and so on, but couldn't figure out how to use them. Many thanks Stefano Stefano Bertolucci 2015-03-13T17:01:53Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2103748 My 14-year-old son is medically complex, including being a quadriplegic. He currently uses software (Grid 3) to communicate ideas and an eye tracker (Tobii) with software that allows him to "type" using his eyes. I am looking for tools that will allow him to work out a math problem through its various steps (since he cannot hold a pencil and write on paper to show his work), and I thought Mathematica might be a tool that could help. Has anybody successfully used Mathematica using mouse movements alone and not typing anything on the keyboard? Thanks. Myles Dear 2020-10-28T18:37:55Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/291822 Is Wolfram Workbench going to be updated to work well with Mathematica 10 and the new syntaxes and operators introduced (`<| ... |>`, `@*` and `/*`)? Szabolcs Horvát 2014-07-11T22:29:14Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1096129 Can somebody give a succinct comparison of the features of the various products: Mathematica, Mathematica Online, Wolfram|One, Wolfram Development Platform, Wolfram Cloud, Wolfram Data Drop. I find differentiating so many similar products — especially those manifestly cloud-based — rather confusing. Murray Eisenberg 2017-05-16T18:35:44Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/413906 In discussions with several university physics professors,,,theoreticians...they profess a strong dislike for Mathematica and caution their students about using it. I can fully understand cautioning a user to make sure they have used the correct syntax or correctly formulated a problem or model, but their caution was stronger than that. They, in effect, prefer to roll their own algorithms. They also claim Mathematica gives bad results, though it was unclear whether the fault lay in the execution or the formulation of a problem. I am troubled by this attitude, since users in all technical disciplines use Mathematica and rely on it to supply solutions to various designs, models, and analyses, some that are mission critical. I performed a literature search on evaluation of Mathematica and the most recent published critique and evaluation I found was for Mathematica 5. Other than this, there does not appear to be an undercurrent of suspicion except from these specific profs. What is going on? I can defend my mathematical models but I cannot defend the outcomes of executions of these models if there is skepticism over the validity of solutions obtained by Mathematica. I can also understand that anyone who has not come up on the learning curve might simply be covering their own inadequacies, hence the attitude of rolling their own. However, everyone should be skeptical of published results from the use of personal algorithms, for which no validation or user community exists. How can the quality of the results from the use of Mathmatica be supported? Are there published evaluations? What might some organizations such as DARPA do to validate some work for which Mathematica has been a cornerstone of the analyses? Or am I the only person to have run into this level of skepticism...which is ironic since I am more skeptical of analytical results than most. Luther Nayhm 2014-12-30T15:36:06Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/194068 Hi All, I have file data only contains x and y points and I would like to import all data and plot them.. This is what I did so far and it works fine. [mcode]list1 = Delete[    Import["C:\\Users\\cinar\\Documents\\Thesis_Numerics\\epsilon\\\ epsilon_0 - Copy - Copy - Copy - Copy\\profile_shapes.0501",     "Table"], {{1}, {2}}]; list2 = Delete[    Import["C:\\Users\\cinar\\Documents\\Thesis_Numerics\\epsilon\\\ epsilon_0 - Copy - Copy - Copy - Copy\\profile_shapes.0500",     "Table"], {{1}, {2}}]; list3 = Delete[    Import["C:\\Users\\cinar\\Documents\\Thesis_Numerics\\epsilon\\\ epsilon_0 - Copy - Copy - Copy - Copy\\profile_shapes.0499",     "Table"], {{1}, {2}}]; list4 = Delete[    Import["C:\\Users\\cinar\\Documents\\Thesis_Numerics\\epsilon\\\ epsilon_0 - Copy - Copy - Copy - Copy\\profile_shapes.0498",     "Table"], {{1}, {2}}]; list5 = Delete[    Import["C:\\Users\\cinar\\Documents\\Thesis_Numerics\\epsilon\\\ epsilon_0 - Copy - Copy - Copy - Copy\\profile_shapes.0100",     "Table"], {{1}, {2}}]; ListLinePlot[{{list1}, list2, list3, list4, list5}][/mcode] I am using delete func. because first two data is blank. I would like to plot them in one screen and don't want to label like list1, list2 etc., Any suggestion? Thanks in advance.. selahittin cinar 2014-02-01T12:14:57Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1298554 I look at the blog post with the 11.3 word cloud with 'Blockchain' as the BIG center and ask how important is that? As I run the exact same data science GPU code on identical hardware software configuration except for the change from Mathematica 11.2 to Mathematica 11.3 and see my neural network performance go from 295 seconds on 11.2 to 2038 seconds on 11.3. Again NO change other than Mathematica version. And then I see that Mathematica 11.3 still does not support current XCode LLVM/GCC compiler or NVIDIA for CUDA tools (watch it move back to old paclet for Mathematica 10.5 after you upgrade your XCode command line tools to current version, am I expected to pay money to figure this out?) . This is my experience as I explore the value of Mathematica since release 10 to today for data science and at the same time see the massive improvements and quality of Python, Jupyter, NVIDIA, iOS CoreML, Vulkan, Tensorflow and core GPU computing on MacOS, iOS and Linux. Really questioning the value proposition of Wolfram for data science going forward. Sad. David Proffer 2018-03-10T04:14:59Z https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/868933 When working on [this question][1] dedicated to what I believe is a significant limitation/defect of the current implementation of the `"LevenbergMarquardt"` algorithm in `FindMinimum`, I found that the same code evaluates 15 - 25 times slower in version 10.4.1 as compared to version 8.0.4 on the same machine! At the bottom of this post a Notebook containing the complete setup reproducing the issue is attached. The following is a comparison of absolute timings of the same `FindMinimum` code evaluated with the two versions along with the number of steps taken by `FindMinimum`, achieved minimum and obtained new values of parameters of the model. The setup can be found in the attached Notebook. With version 8.0.4 on Windows 7 x64 I get the following: findMinimum[init, MaxIterations -> 500, WorkingPrecision -> 20, PrecisionGoal -> 3, StepMonitor :> ++steps, Method -> {"LevenbergMarquardt", "Residual" -> residualVect}] > {"00:06:35", 220, 0.00405321003823167, > {?0[1]->406.18, ?[1]->346.16, ?[2]->0.22879, ?0[2]->666.41, ?[2]->239.54, ?[3]->0.20278}} The output means that the evaluation has taken 6 min 35 sec and finished in 220 steps, obtained minimum is `0.00405321003823167`, the obtained new values of the parameters follow. And this is what I get with version 10.4.1 installed on the same machine: findMinimum[init, MaxIterations -> 500, WorkingPrecision -> 20, PrecisionGoal -> 3, StepMonitor :> ++steps, Method -> {"LevenbergMarquardt", "Residual" -> residualVect}] > {"02:37:07", 220, 0.00405321003823167, > {?0[1]->406.18, ?[1]->346.16, ?[2]->0.22879, ?0[2]->666.41, ?[2]->239.54, ?[3]->0.20278}} As you see, the only difference is that now the evaluation has taken 2 hours 37 min 7 sec! **It is more than 23 times slower than with version 8.0.4!** ---------- Do you experience the same problem? Is it possible to get `FindMinimum` of version 10.4.1 working as fast as `FindMinimum` of version 8.0.4? [1]: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/116295/280 Alexey Popkov 2016-06-07T09:49:31Z