Mathematica: A system for doing mathematics by computer

Mathematica is a computer software system for symbolic manipulation and numerical computation; it has excellent graphics, a high-level, mathematically-oriented programming language and, very importantly, it takes seriously the need for work to be interactive, properly presented and communicated. This article is in fact prepared as a Mathematica “notebook”. An extensive library of supporting software “packages” has been developed, and several books about using it are now available.