In the several decades of my theoretical physics research before Mathematica, I performed very few numerical calculations; numerics (mainly fighting with Fortran, which I found dreadful) was something I imposed on my students. By the mid-1980s I was starting to use BASIC, which was more friendly. But the instant I learned about Mathematica in 1988 (from John Guckenhimer), I realized that this software, together with my newly acquired Mac II computer, was exactly what I needed. And so it proved: since then, I have done almost all the numerics and created all the graphics in more than a hundred research papers. People sometimes recommend other software for particular tasks (manipulating matrices,, creating pictures, performing algebra, …) but Mathematica has the advantage of being a single rich environment within which I can do everything.

Congratulations on a quarter-century of Mathematica, which has transformed the way I work, along with thousands of scientists worldwide.