Re: Student v. Full version of Mathematica
- Subject: [mg3253] Re: Student v. Full version of Mathematica
- From: harrison at helios.physics.utoronto.ca (David Harrison)
- Date: 21 Feb 1996 14:28:00 -0600
- Approved: usenet@wri.com
- Distribution: local
- Newsgroups: wri.mathgroup
- Organization: University of Toronto - Dept. of Physics
- Sender: daemon at wri.com
In article <4g58r4$rb0 at dragonfly.wolfram.com>, Sarah Lonberg-Lew <sarah at phage.elsie.brandeis.edu> wrote: >I am looking to invest in Mathematica for my home computer and would like >some advice about whether or not to buy the full version. I was told >that the student version is severly handicapped to the point where it >will not access the math co-processor ... That is true. In the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, Mathematica is one of the tools used for calculations in atmospheric physics. Thus, we tried using these Mathematica programs for some "real world" benchmarks. The programs make extensive floating point calculations, and we expected the student version to fare poorly compared to the full version. We did these a couple of years ago, and used our fastest PC's, which were 80486 DX based with lots of memory. To our surprise, in general the student version of Mathematica executed at about 80% of the speed of the full version. We found no case where the student version was worse than 50% of the speed of the full version, and a couple of cases were they were close to identical. Sadly, a research group doesn't qualify for the student discount. Also, I believe the student version doesn't qualify for the MathPlus upgrade program. But I recommend it to my students, some of whom make very computationally demanding usage of it. -- David Harrison | "The senses do not lie, only Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Toronto | they do not tell the truth." Inet: harrison at faraday.physics.utoronto.ca | -- Mach Tel: 416-978-2977 Fax: 416-978-5848 |