Productivity & Usability

Free-form linguistic input

Free-form linguistics provides a flexible way to communicate with Mathematica, unrestricted by syntax. Whether you are a new user eager to get started or an expert exploring new functionality, using free-form input delivers quick results as well as the exact syntax for future use.

Live math typesetting

Mathematica moves mathematical typesetting beyond a simple equation editor. Expressions can be input in a fully traditional form and then immediately evaluated to produce typeset output that can be edited, reevaluated, exported, and so on.

Active documentation with 100,000 examples

Mathematica documentation is comprised of interactive notebooks containing more than 100,000 examples. All examples are immediately executable and modifiable, making it easy to rapidly learn new functions.

Assistant palettes

Palettes provide immediate point-and-click access to an extensive range of capabilities, from creating syntactically complete expressions and inserting special characters to building up charts and slide shows. They serve as convenient entry points for novice users and as useful shortcuts for experienced users, who can also create their own customized palettes with fully programmable functionality.

Document-centered interface

Mathematica documents make exploring new ideas more efficient. Since they keep all elements of a project—calculations, visualizations, data, documentation, and even interactive applications—in one place, working on a problem means automatically creating a document that can be used to solve similar problems in the future, to present results, or to record different avenues of exploration.

Integrated graphics editing and drawing

Graphics can be created, annotated, or modified using a full suite of familiar interactive drawing tools, including sampling and application of styles, aligning objects using guides, and adding formatted text and equations. Graphics can also be used as input, such as for real-time algorithmic processing and enhancement of interactive drawings.

Integrated word processing

Mathematica includes all the usual features of a top-quality word-processing system, plus many additional capabilities. The underlying symbolic structure of documents delivers full markup, cascading stylesheets, and immediate global restyling. Documents can be optimized not only for interactive use, but also for export to web and print media. Over a thousand formatting and styling options are accessible both from menus and programmatically.

Integrated presentations

With Mathematica you can immediately turn working notebook documents into slide shows containing real-time computations and even interactive applications. The cell structure of notebooks conveniently allows code used to generate graphics or other elements to be hidden for presentation, yet maintained in the underlying document.