Wolfram Mathematica 12 (usually termed Mathematica) is a modern technical computing system spanning most areas of technical computing — including neural networks, machine learning, image processing, geometry, data science, visualizations, and others. The system is used in many technical, scientific, engineering, mathematical, and computing fields. It was conceived by Stephen Wolfram and is developed by Wolfram Research of Champaign, Illinois. The Wolfram Language is the programming language used in Mathematica.
The Notebook interface
Wolfram Mathematica is split into two parts, the kernel and the front end. The kernel interprets expressions (Wolfram Language code) and returns result expressions, which can then be displayed by the front end.
The front end, designed by Theodore Gray[11] in 1988, provides a graphical user interface (GUI), which allows the creation and editing of Notebook documents[12] containing program code with Syntax highlighting, formatted text together with results including typeset mathematics, graphics, GUI components, tables, and sounds. All content and formatting can be generated algorithmically or edited interactively. Standard word processing capabilities are supported, including real-time multi-lingual spell-checking.
Documents can be structured using a hierarchy of cells, which allow for outlining and sectioning of a document and support automatic numbering index creation. Documents can be presented in a slideshow environment for presentations. Notebooks and their contents are represented as Mathematica expressions that can be created, modified or analyzed by Mathematica programs or converted to other formats.
Presenter tools support the creation of slide-show style presentations that support interactive elements and code execution during the presentation.
Among the alternative front ends is the Wolfram Workbench, an Eclipse based integrated development environment (IDE), introduced in 2006. It provides project-based code development tools for Mathematica, including revision management, debugging, profiling, and testing.[13] There is a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA based IDEs to work with Wolfram Language code which in addition to syntax highlighting can analyse and auto-complete local variables and defined functions.[14] The Mathematica Kernel also includes a command line front end.[15] Other interfaces include JMath,[16] based on GNU readline and WolframScript[17] which runs self-contained Mathematica programs (with arguments) from the UNIX command line.
High-performance computing
Capabilities for high-performance computing were extended with the introduction of packed arrays in version 4 (1999)[18] and sparse matrices (version 5, 2003),[19] and by adopting the GNU Multi-Precision Library to evaluate high-precision arithmetic.
Version 5.2 (2005) added automatic multi-threading when computations are performed on multi-core computers.[20] This release included CPU-specific optimized libraries.[21] In addition Mathematica is supported by third party specialist acceleration hardware such as ClearSpeed.[22]
In 2002, gridMathematica was introduced to allow user level parallel programming on heterogeneous clusters and multiprocessor systems[23] and in 2008 parallel computing technology was included in all Mathematica licenses including support for grid technology such as Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft Compute Cluster Server and Sun Grid.
Support for CUDA and OpenCL GPU hardware was added in 2010.[24] Also, since version 8 it can generate C code, which is automatically compiled by a system C compiler, such as GCC or Microsoft Visual Studio.
In 2019 support was added for compiling Wolfram Language code to LLVM.
