Stephen Wolfram: Reinventing Mathematica

I remember when Mathematica came on the scene in 1988. It worked on a Macintosh and was far beyond any math program that came before. Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of the Wolfram Research, got his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech when he was 20, and focused on studying complex systems, discovering connections between computation and nature and exploring the field of cellular autonoma. In 2002 Wolfram published a 1280-page controversial tome, A New Kind of Science, where he presents a new conceptual framework that applies to fundamental questions of physics, math, biology, computer science. 

More recently he focused his energy on a new release of his commercial software, Mathematica 6. According to the company Web site, Mathematica 6 is the most important advance in the product's 20-year history, a dramatic breakthrough, a redefinition of the way we think about computation, a sweeping unification of language and interface concepts with 1000 new functions and enhancements, a whole new way of interacting with the world of data. 

I cannot judge those outsized claims, but for the math crowd Mathematica 6 is definitely worth investigating based on its history, as well as Wolfram's accomplishments and personal need for an application that does 'higher' math and is an expression of his concepts.  Also, check out the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, which is described as "an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields."