Technology Enhancement for Calculus

A Short Introduction to Mathematica

Mathematica is a computer algebra system; as such it can perform numerical computations as well as symbolic algebra and calculus manipulations. For instance, you can use Mathematica

  • to tell you the first 200 digits of the square root of 2,
  • to factor the polynomial x4-5x3+x2+21x-18,
  • to compute the anti-derivative of a function such as f(x)=x15 sin(2x+3), or
  • to graph the derivative of f(x)=tan(x2-1)
all of which are quite laborious to "do by hand".

Do not expect miracles: Mathematica will not be able to do (much) more symbollically than what your teacher teaches you in a Calculus course; use it mainly to explore, visualize and check your work!

For newcomers it is quite frustrating to learn how to write Mathematica notebooks, but as you will see it's not too bad to learn how to use and manipulate notebooks - and this will/should be your main interaction with this site. Do not try to write or understand code yourself - at least not in the beginning - but rather concentrate your efforts on learning how to change a few things in a notebook already written.

Let's get started! If you click on the link below, Mathematica should open the notebook "Introduction.nb" for you.

If this does not work, download the file "Introduction.nb" to your computer manually, and try to open the notebook then with Mathematica, or vice versa: open Mathematica, then open the downloaded file. If these things don't work, you need to find someone who can help you with this.

Links

© 2000-2001. Helmut Knaust, Department of Mathematical Sciences, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso TX 79968-0514.
I encourage you to email me comments, corrections, questions, answers, etc. at helmut@math.utep.edu.

This site is made possible by support from the Challenge 1998 Grant held by the Region 19 Education Service Center, in partnership with the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence and the University of Texas at El Paso.

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