Note for Fall 2008 A new version of Mathematica (6.0) was released last year. Although most of the code is compatible with previous versions, this was a major reorganization of the program. I have gone through course materials to account for changes, but there may be some things that I have missed. Among the changes are
  • In previous versions the main documentation and help facility was the "Help Browser." The new version has a "Documentation Center" that is organized differently but contains even more information and is accessed under the Help Menu.
  • Some of the more specialized functionality of Mathematica is contained in packages that need to be loaded before they are active. In previous versions they were arranged in categories. For example, there is a package called Combinatorica that lets you work with finite graphs, among other things. It was in the DiscreteMath category, but now the same package is just in an unclassified collection. The impact of this is that the expression that is evaluated to load the Combinatorica package has been changed from
    <<DiscreteMath`Combinatorica`
    to
    <<Combinatorica`
    The punctuation at the end of the line is important. It is called a RawBackquote, or Backquote for short, and is located in the top left of most keyboards. The category names (Graphics`, Statistics`, DiscreteMath`, and Geometry` are a few of them) should simply be removed. Moreover, there are many functions that were part of packages that are now built-in. One such example is NormalDistribution. In previous versions, you needed to load the NormalDistribution package with the expression
    <<Statistics`NormalDistribution`
    Now you can jump in and use this function without loading a package at all.
  • The location of some menu items have been changed.
  • The function to graph discrete data is ListPlot and two changes been made in it. First, you can plot multiple lists. In previous versions there was a MultipleListPlot package that needed to be loaded, so if you see MultipleListPlot in the notes, it should now be simply ListPlot. Second, the data is, by default, not joined by lines. You can override this default with an option that used to be called PlotJoined, but in Verison 6.0 it is called simply Joined. Therefore, an expression like
    ListPlot[mylist, PlotJoined->True]
    should be changed to
    ListPlot[mylist, Joined->True]
  • A new function called FilePrint lets you examine the contents of a text file. For example, if a file called "abc.txt" is in your current directory, then

    FilePrint["abc.txt"]

    will print the file contents below this expression. This doesn't "load" the file in order to let you use it - you would use OpenRead/Read to input the file. In previous version of Mathematica the same visual examination of the file would be accomplished with

    !!abc.txt

    but this latter expression no longer works.

    Ken Levasseur
    Instructor, Applied Math for Life Scientists