Hi all,

 

I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the symbolic computation program « Wolfram Mathematica », in its version 8.0.4 (later versions are for Vista+ only), actually works quite pretty well on ReactOS (as of r74550): see the screen-capture at http://i.imgur.com/KegyW79.png .

This software is broadly used in many scientific, engineering, mathematical, and computing fields. This is for example used intensively in theoretical physics (in high-energy physics, statistical physics etc.) due to the existence of numerous packages that have been developed for it. The only problem of this software resides in its price…

On the screen-capture I demonstrate an infinitesimal portion of what Mathematica can do: for the non-connoisseurs :) the picture shows the computation of the integral (area under the curve) of the 1-dimensional Gaussian function over the whole real axis (the result is square-root of pi), and then I plot in 3 dimensions the map of a 2-D Gaussian function, where on the horizontal plane there are the x and y axes, and the vertical axis is the z axis. The 3-D graph can be rotated, zoomed-in and out with the mouse, it can be edited, etc… The software also proposes an extensive and interactive help documentation. Finally I show the “fancy” text-mode only interface of Mathematica, that nobody actually uses (it is only used when computing stuff in batch-mode).

There are almost no graphical glitches. Few font problems can be seen (see the about-box, and the minus signs on the graph replaced by boxes). There are few keyboard shortcut problems such as pressing (on French keyboards) AltGr-5 to enter ‘[‘ doesn’t work, but anyways…

 

Enjoy!

 

Best,

Hermès