Re: Recom on Mathcad/Mathematica

[Gary Karshner <Karshner@STMARYTX.EDU>]

Ivan,
        For the last eight years I have used Mathcad in my freshman calculus
physics course. I like it because it is easy for the students to learn and
reenforces the calculus symbolism that they are learning concurrently. We
use it physic lab, and the ability to import data from the experiment
directly into program is a feature we constantly use. This is not one of
Mathcads strong points but it does work, and lets our students work with
large arrays of data and get meaningful statistics.
         I have done only one project with Mathematica and was impressed with its
power. I did this a number of years ago and don't own a copy which is why I
only used it that one time. At that time it was not straightforward to use,
i.e you wrote a "program" and it would display the result when you "ran"
it, unlike Mathcad's pallets of icons that allow you to straightforwardly
set up your equations. I really dislike the necessity of learning a new
language to set my problems.
        This year all our freshmen are being "given" a laptop PC machines. Last
spring engineering, mathematics and ourselves discussed what programs we
wanted to give our students to avoid competing with each other. The
engineers wanted to use Matlab, but again the math and physics dept felt it
was far to big a step for our freshman. The engineers feel that Matlab is
an industrial standard where as none of them uses Mathcad. The math
department in the past has used Maple (a Mathematica look a like) in their
upper division classes.
        This fall we have a campus wide licence for Mathcad with the calculus math
class and physics using it in our introductory courses. We will see how it
works. Previously in physics, we only had it available in the labs so it
was hard to assign students homework problems using it. A real teller for
my on student use was that students after they finished my class were
asking to use Mathcad to solve problems in their other classes.
        The weak point of Mathcad is that it is not a "great" symbolic manipulator
and is not the  "standard" for symbolic or calculation of models, rolls
that currently seem to be held by Mathecatica and Matlab. In my own work in
recent years, Mathcad has been more then adequate,but if you do complex
math, it can have some real limitation. For me Mathcad seems to occupies
niche of being a compromise between the two types of problems and like all
compromises is not optimized for symbolic or the manipulation of data sets...

Gary

At 02:11 PM 8/24/00 -0700, you wrote:
> Greetings Physicists and others:
>
> Our campus computer lab coordinator who is responsible for software
> purchases etc recently sent out the following message to the math and
> science faculty:
>
> > I'm trying to gather your thoughts about migrating from MathCad to
> > Mathematica. For several years now we've been using MathCad as a teaching
> > tool; MathSoft has revised its pricing policy to ensure that they get a
> > constant stream of cash in "subscription fees". Mathematica has better
> > symbolic manipulation and 3D rendering capabilities than MathCad.
> > Furthermore, Mathematica has been keeping up with technological advances on
> > the Macintosh platform.
> >
> > On the minus side, a campus-wide switch from MathCad to Mathematica will
> > require those of you currently using MathCad to switch to a another
> > software you may not be familiar with. Perhaps it may be a good idea to
> > hang on to our copies of MathCad 6 or 7 while we purchase new copies of
> > Mathematica 4.0. What are your thoughts about this?
>
> Our department has been using Mathcad for quite some time for a wide
> variety of our service courses and major classes and have been generally
> quite happy with it.  Our perception is that it is quite capable and that
> the learning curve is not too steep.
>
> What are your experiences with Mathcad or Mathematica or other tools for
> use with science majors and with general students?
>
> Possible questions:
> How does the ease of use compare?
> How steep is the learning curve for each?
>        -can it be easily used by someone that does not know programming?
> Can you comment on the relative symbolic and graphic capabilities?
> Ability to interface easily with other common software tools such as MS
> Word and MS Excel?
> Which is the most widely used in academia vs industry?
> Would your responses depend on the type of student?
>
> Your responses would be the most instructive if you include:
>        Teachiing level (college, high school and lower division vs upper
> div.))
>        Computer platform (PC vs Mac)
>        Software version numbers used
>
> Ivan Rouse, Professor and Chair
> Physics Department, La Sierra University
> 4700 Pierce St., Riverside, CA 92515
> email: irouse@lasierra.edu
> web: http://physics.lasierra.edu/irouse/
> phone: 909-785-2137, FAX 909-785-2215

Gary Karshner

St. Mary's University
San Antonio, Texas
KARSHNER@STMARYTX.EDU