"Actually, I'd like to play around with Mathematica at home too. I'm delving into ideas related to precision and accuracy, working with higher logarithms to any base, and reaching and exceeding Graham's Number. It's a lot of fun."

Shhhh...Quiet Down Out There!

There's something that people who live and work near the highways in California are not too happy about: the noise! John Candelaria, a civil engineer in the environmental department at Caltrans (California Department of Transportation), is using Mathematica to help quiet things down.

The idea is to design and construct soundwalls that will absorb and deflect the sound before it gets beyond the freeway. The 2D and 3D views Candelaria generates with Mathematica save him from having to do tedious cross-sectional drawings of surrounding areas by hand. He also finds its computational powers handy for doing the calculations involved in various acoustical studies.

Candelaria explains, "As we evaluate all the factors--the surrounding topography, varying wall heights, construction materials (from wood to rubberized particle board made of pulverized tires), distance from nearby residents, etc.--our goal is to get the sound below 65 decibels. Mathematica helps us integrate data with complex mathematical formulas and turn them into useful graphics."

Key features of Mathematica used:

• Numeric--especially its ability to deal with large and accurate numbers
• Graphic--2D and 3D views, contour mapping, density plots
• MathLink