The Units & Constants Controller makes the insertion of a constant into a calculation very simple. You might wonder, though, why anyone who wanted to use the magnetic moment of the deuteron would be using the cut down version of Mathematica. Still, it’s in there if you want it

It all works rather like a calculator – in some respects like a sophisticated HP ‘Reverse Polish Notation’ one where the results are on a ‘stack’ to be used by the next operation. However, unlike a calculator, there’s a complicated Mathematica machine underneath it all and this can cause some problems; you can end up in a bit of a mess if you don’t have at least some understanding of how Mathematica behaves. For example, once or twice, I ended in a state where I couldn’t get the notebook to recalculate. I pressed an incorrect key combination when trying to enter a subscript in a formula and ended up in some odd Mathematica state where nothing worked as I expected. Figuring out what had gone wrong the first time took a bit of work.

One thing I liked about CalcCenter is the simple point-and-click way of getting a useful constant, such as the age of the universe. From the Controller pane, you click ‘Units & Constants’, ‘Physical Constants’ then AgeOfUniverse (say). You can then use this in calculations exactly as if you’d typed it in the hard way. Quite neat – and very fast to use.

So what didn’t I like about CalcCenter? Not too much, really. As I said above, it’s a layer on top of Mathematica and if you don’t like the Mathematica way of doing things, you may not get on too well with CalcCenter. Personally, I don’t have too many problems with Mathematica (apart from its error messages, which can drive me to distraction. What do you mean there’s an error in here somewhere? Where, damn you!). However, the InstantCalculators do a fair job of helping out in this respect, interpreting the underlying Mathematica error messages into something more understandable.

Something that did trip me up was that some of the original Mathematica functions have been modified in CalcCenter. For example, the Plot function in Mathematica has different keywords and styles to the identically named function in CalcCenter and, in addition, it behaves in subtly different fashion. Also, there are one or two stylistic differences. For example, the += style of operator familiar to C and C++ programmers isn’t supported. Wolfram says that CalcCenter is designed to be simpler in operation than Mathematica and has made changes to some features accordingly.

CalcCenter is aimed squarely at the mid-market mathematical and engineering sector. So how does it compare with, say, MathCad (http://www.mathsoft.com)? At $1,199.99 MathCad 12 is priced mid-way between CalcCenter and Mathematica (but, curiously, the UK price of £645 ex VAT puts it closer to CalcCenter http://www.adeptscience.co.uk). However, MathCad isn’t cut down – you get everything that MathCad has to offer. In contrast, CalcCenter does restrict some of the full Mathematica functionality, but as Wolfram points out, CalcCenter is at its heart a fully symbolic computational engine from top to bottom. Both CalcCenter and Mathematica will treat the output of one function as the symbolic input to a second. This enables you to work with the entire symbolic representation of a problem, rather than as a set of numbers transferred from one stage to another.

Overall, I think that CalcCenter achieves its goal of presenting a simple and clean interface to the underlying Mathematica engine. I started off disliking CalcCenter – the InstantCalculators just got in the way at first, mainly I suspect because I’m reasonably familiar with Mathematica. But the more I used CalcCenter, the better I liked it. I ended up liking it quite a lot. What I found particularly useful was the ability to pick a function or constant off the shelf, so to speak, and quickly use it without having to go through the Mathematica help system (always a pain). There was a one very minor bug I found and some (intentional) inconsistencies between the full Mathematica and CalcCenter but nothing serious. With CalcCenter, Wolfram has achieved a much simpler way of using the power of Mathematica. It should be of considerable potential benefit to those who want something better than a spreadsheet but don’t want to spend the time required to learn the full Mathematica system.

Dermot Hogan