Abstract

Mathematica does nearly all the ordinary engineering mathematics which working engineers need. Mathematica has always done more than Computer Algebra (CA). Numerics, graphics, and user-interface matters have been smoothly integrated with the CA. Mathematica 3 adds mathematical word processing and hyperlinks. This opens the way to truly impressive, useful `electronic books', `interactive engineering handbooks', etc..

The ratio of engineering users of Mathematica to academic mathematician users is already greater than one, and rapidly increasing. The main part of the paper reports on a Pack - suite of useful code - for Mechanical Engineers. The Pack - an `interactive engineering handbook' - described in the paper is incontrovertibly useful for engineers, but, as this is a conference for mathematicians, the thrust of the paper concerns the relevance of the Pack for applied mathematicians -- for our teaching of engineering mathematics and for our research. To illustrate matters concerning the latter, the elastic torsion problem is used as an example, and some developments from earlier work are reported.