Chapter 11 Mathematica for economists

This chapter discusses the design of mathematica, the front end, programming, packages, mathsource, and application in economics. Mathematica is a computer program that can help in mathematics. It can be used to do symbolic, numeric, and graphical analysis. There are two parts to the Mathematica program: the kernel and the front end. The kernel is the basic computational engine and is more-or-less platform independent; the front-end is slightly different for each platform. These two programs can be run separately: the front end can run on a Macintosh while the kernel executes on a remote workstation or a supercomputer. Mathematica keeps a record of a session in a format known as a Notebook. This is an ASCII file and is essentially machine independent. It allows the input and output of Mathematica to be organized in a convenient way. Mathematica also has tools for procedural programming, which is the style of programming used in Fortran, Pascal, and C. However, these toolsDO loops, WHILE loops, and the likeare normally not the best way to program in Mathematica.