Mathematica

What is mathematica

Mathematica is a "universal tool" for numerical and symbolic mathematics, as well as computing in the sense of realizations of algorithms and handling of data structures. It may also be considered as a programming language which allows various styles of programming (procedure-, function-, list-, rule-oriented, etc.) as well as it allows a mixture of these. Mathematica has also functionality for plotting, animations and audio. In addition, the tool has a notebook functionality which enables an integrated documentation of the work. For futher information and a brief comparison with alternative tools, see for instance the Mathematica entry in Wikipedia.

Mathematica at the Departement of Telematics

For student usage, Mathematica 6.0 is installed on all workstations in Gobi B206, 1st floor Electro building B, and Sahara F272, 1st floor west wing of building F, in the "Elektro" complex.

Students may install a copy of Mathematica on their personal workstations and use one of the department's licences while following the course. Contact the O&M group in room A-291.

How to get started

To get started, you may consult:

• Mathematica documentation under 'Help'. In particular in the 'Help Browser', it may be useful to have a look at 'Getting Started', 'Tour', 'Demos' and to the 'Practical Introduction to Mathematica' in the 'Mathematica Book'.
• Tutorials and other resources on the Internet. For instance:
  • Essential Mathematica for Students of Science by James J. Kelly [University of Maryland],
  • Mathematica tutorials by David Withoff [Wolfram], and
  • Animated Mathematic functions for a graphical illustration of the usage of some built-in commands.
  A list of tutorials and more resources is also available here, and advanced users may get some valuable hints in the Supplementary Mathematica Help Browser.

Dependability packages

StateDiagrams and BlockDiagrams are packages developed for analysis of dependability models based on continuous time discrete state Markov chains (state diagrams) and reliability block diagrams, respectively. Both packages are introduced during the lectures and can be used to solve the exercises.

They may be used for symbolic as well as numerical analysis. The size of the systems that can be evaluated using StateDiagrams, i.e. the number of states that can be handled, depends on whether a numerical or symbolic analysis is performed as well as the structure of the transition matrix. In general, numerical evaluation allows far lager systems. No practical upper limit of the size of the systems that can be evaluated using BlockDiagrams is foreseen.

Package name	m file	Introductory notebook
StateDiagrams
BlockDiagrams