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- Mathematica Version 4.0 (or later). This numerics-symbolics-graphics package is installed on the PCs at UMASTR lab. It includes complete on-line
documentation. I will help you learn how to use and program in Mathematica. If you have Version 3 you will need to upgrade it.
If you wish to run Mathematica on your own Windows 95/NT/2000 PC, Macintosh, or Linux PC running X-windows, you can buy the student version of Mathematica, called Mathematica for Students. It’s
available for about $140 on CD from Wolfram Research (http://store.wolfram.com/view/mathforstudents) or perhaps for a bit less at the computer
department of Follett’s Campus Center Bookstore Bookstore). The student version is the full product and is not crippled in any way, although you get only limited tech support from the publisher.
Upgrades of the student version from earlier versions may be available from the publisher. Be sure you have a powerful enough computer. Keep your receipt, which you may need later to get updates!
However, since computers running Mathematica are available at UMASTR lab and elsewhere on campus, you are not required to buy this software or to have a computer of your own.
- Course-specific Mathematica notebooks—live electronic documents—that reside on a file server at the lab from which they are immediately accessible there. You may also download them to your own
computer from links on the Math 236 Web site (http://www.math.umass.edu/Courses/Math_236).
The very same notebooks that work on PCs work identically on Macs and Linux PCs running X-windows.
- Netscape Navigator Version 4 browser. This browser is installed on the lab computers; you can download it for free to your own computer. (Probably all online materials will
work fine with Microsoft Internet Explorer, or with Netscape Version 6, but this cannot be guaranteed.)
To read on-line versions of homework set assignments and some notes, you also need the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in. It is also installed on lab
computers; you can download it for free to your own computer.
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