The Role of Mathematica 3.0 in Engineering Education

Abstract

Mathematica has been extensively used by engineers, engineering educators and students in various branches of engineering worldwide. Along with the traditional computational facilities for numerical computational and graphics, Mathematica offers a rich set of utilities for symbolic computing and technical documentation. The extent of the computational tools and the level of integration of various components enable a technical user to adopt Mathematica at every step of modeling, analysis, design and simulation.

The new features introduced in Mathematica 3.0 enable the user to organize technical documents in platform-independent Mathematica notebooks. With the on-line help system, the user can incorporate his/her own documents into the Mathematica's interactive help browser. In this system, hyperlinks and buttons as well as advanced search techniques can be utilized to navigate in a notebook effectively and to access to desired portions of a document easily.

This pyramid of utilities is supported by the Mathematica Programming Language. In the Mathematica 3.0 system, everything is an expression and any expression can be programatically manipulated by the Mathematica kernel. This fact opens up a totally new set of exciting possibilities in engineering and engineering education. A user can manipulate any aspect of his/her computational environment within the computational engine. In this presentation, I will briefly talk about the implications of this new technology in engineering education.