| by Leanne Fornaca, ITS
Ah, Mathematica. An incredibly powerful program, with
superb computational and representational skills, exceptional
value as a mathematical teaching tool . . . and a difficult
and complicated user interface.
This great tool for students and professors of mathematics
was either minimally used or required many hours of valuable
class time to learn, because of the incomprehensibility
of its interface. Even simple equations required complicated
coding before Mathematica could read them in and solve
them. Two Wellesley professors decided to develop a computer
program to make running Mathematica simpler for the everyday
user.
The Joy of Mathematica, released in its final version
in 1994 and significantly updated in 2000, is a collection
of Mathematica notebooks and packages created by Alan Shuchat
and Fred Shultz, professors of mathematics at Wellesley
College. It is designed to make interaction between the
user and Mathematica simpler and more user-friendly. In
essence, Joy is a shell that is designed to work along
with Mathematica. It acts as an overlay to the Mathematica
program, providing it with new menus and dialog boxes,
minimizing the amount of coding and knowledge of syntax
that is necessary to use Mathematica effectively. Joy includes
a palette of buttons to create common mathematical notation.
Whereas Mathematica is command-oriented, Joy is dialog-oriented.
For example, to get this graph,
a user would have to type this in Mathematica:
In Joy, however, it's as simple as this:
Instead of needing to know the code for each expression,
with Joy a user needs only to fill out a dialog box. Joy
converts this into a form that Mathematica can understand.
It is configured to handle roughly fifty of Mathematica's
most commonly used computational functions. It also provides
users with helpful error messages so that they can determine
what part of the code they are having problems with. Joy
permits the user to see the commands it creates in one
of two formats: the full syntax for Mathematica, or a paraphrased
version. This can help users learn Mathematica's syntax
on the fly. Typing directly in the Mathematica window allows
easy access to the more complicated Mathematica functions
that Joy is not programmed to handle.
The current version of Joy is published by Harcourt/Academic
Press and runs on Windows and Power Macintosh. It is optimized
for Mathematica 4.0 (requires 3.0 or higher). It is accompanied
by a book that is a manual for the Joy software, an introduction
to using Joy and Mathematica in mathematics and its applications
to other fields, and a supplementary text. It includes
examples, exercises, and labs for topics in calculus, differential
equations, and linear algebra.
Joy is used mainly as a teaching tool at Wellesley. While
Mathematica by itself may take several class periods to
teach so that students can use it properly, with Joy it
now takes less than one class period to learn to use Mathematica
well. Professor Shultz explains that the primary purpose
of using Mathematica in the classroom is to help students
better understand the concepts behind mathematics and to
enlarge the class of problems that can be solved.
The program is more than just a teaching tool for students
who are taking mathematics. Joy is an interface designed
for any user, and it is ideal for those who are casual
users of Mathematica or who feel more comfortable with
a graphical interface instead of a text-based interface.
According to Professor Shuchat, Joy has been used by
individual faculty and students at a broad range of colleges,
universities, and high schools, and by researchers in various
industrial settings. In addition to mathematics, there
are users in other branches of science, engineering, and
the social sciences. There are Joy users in Europe and
Asia as well as the Americas, and the first edition of
the Joy book was translated into Japanese.
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