Mathematica 7

Mathematica 7 is released today, and its new features are summarised here. Hang on! I haven't yet mastered all of the new features that were added in Mathematica 6 (see here).

The Mathematica "universe" is growing so large that I find that there is a dynamic equilibrium between the things that I learn about it and the things that I forget, so I can never hold it all simultaneously in my head. I wonder if anybody understands it all.

Anyway, for those of you who don't already know, Mathematica is a "tool of thought" that raises your consciousness to levels that you didn't think were possible. But it does require a lot of practise to become a master of this art.

Update (20 November 2008): Something that caught my eye in the list of new features of Mathematica 7 was "Multicore parallelism standard with zero configuration on all versions of Mathematica" (see here). What this means is that when you run Mathematica 7 on a multicore computer (these days, all new computers are multicore) it can parallelise across the cores. In the basic version of Mathematica 7 you can have a maximum of 4 cores running in parallel (see here), which allows you to have 1 master and 3 slave processes, which gives a useful degree of parallelism straight out of the box. This parallel processing capability will be very useful when applied to the image processing capabilities of Mathematica 7 (see here).

Update (24 November 2008): It just keeps getting better! Running Mathematica on your own personal super-computer (for a reasonable cost, that is) will be reality not that far in the future judging by the following announcements:

• Mathematica Users Get 100x Performance Boost From NVIDIA CUDA
• Nvidia Details 'Personal Supercomputer' Design Based on Tesla GPU

Update (2 December 2008): Some gratuitous showing off of the image processing capabilities of Mathematica 7 has been published at The Incredible Convenience of Mathematica Image Processing on the Wolfram blog.