Re: The audience for Mathematica (Was: Re: Show doesn't work inside
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg102183] Re: The audience for Mathematica (Was: Re: Show doesn't work inside
- From: Pillsy <pillsbury at gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:59:06 -0400 (EDT)
On Jul 29, 5:07 am, Richard Fateman <fate... at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote: > Helen Read wrote: > > It *is* useful to average college students. Every one of my calculus > > students learns to use Mathematica successfully, even the below average > > students. The Classroom Assistant palette has made the learning curve > > even easier for them. > By what measure is it useful to these students? What most observers > would consider a mark of success is that the students learned the > subject matter (calculus) more effectively with Mathematica than > without. I started using Mathematica around the time I took calculus---I was a "bright high school student" rather than an "average college student"---but I found it very helpful at the time, even when I was primarily using it for self-directed study. Having something that I could check my results against, especially when I was learning to do integrals, was really quite helpful, as was having an easy way to numerically solve and plot the solutions of ODEs, or even comparing plots of functions and their derivatives. This was all about 15 years ago (Mathematica 2.2, I think) and graphing calculators may be a lot more capable now, but then again Mathematica has gotten a lot easier to use in a lot of ways. I really wish I'd had the online help system back then, that's for sure. I also wound up teaching myself a fair amount about special functions just because they were there in the program and they seemed kind of cool and mysterious. It was really useful having that knowledge going into classes on PDEs and quantum mechanics in college. > Being introduced to Mathematica per se may be useful to some > of them who have a career that involves continued access to Mathematica > or perhaps similar programs, but this is somewhat unlikely to be the > case for "average" math students. This may be true. As a better-than-average math student who ended up going into physics, I found knowing Mathematica was quite useful at every subsequent stage of my career. I don't know how much of this is attributable to Mathematica per se; the benefits might well have been similar if I'd gotten started with a competing product. Cheers, Pillsy