Wolfram Mathematica is the platform of choice for solving insanely hard problems
November 09, 2018

Wolfram Mathematica is the platform of choice for solving insanely hard problems

George Danner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Wolfram Mathematica

Wolfram Mathematica is a desktop environment for building applications in the Wolfram Language. The Wolfram Language, in turn, is a functional programming utility for solving all sorts of complex problems in a wide variety of fields, from science to business and government.

Ours is a consultancy that uses tools like Mathematica to solve insanely hard problems for our clients, which are mostly large corporations with complex operations. Everyone at our small firm uses Mathematica in one way or another.

While Mathematica can quite literally do anything, the most common use case is as a means to build a mathematical model or representation of some complex system that one wishes to study using data. Along the way the model builder can use the vast array of internal functions (6500 or so at last count) to perform operations as diverse as image processing, statistics, and optimization. The real benefit of Mathematica is in its ability to allow model builders to generate such models very quickly with less code than other languages like Python or R.
  • You can stay in one environment as you progress from idea to prototype to production code to deployment; this hastens the development cycle at every step along the way
  • You can take advantage of the thousands (> 6000) functions that perform many math and logic transformations that are common to analysis today
  • The notebook interface is a very natural way to program, and allows code to be interwoven with explanatory text.
  • Mathematica is one of the most stable software platforms in the world, in existence for 30 years.
  • Depending on the size of the application, the cost of licenses can be prohibitive in some cases, especially for Wolfram Private Cloud.
  • Mathematica is our "go to" environment for developing solutions for our clients, so I suppose you could say that it is solely responsible for our revenues. On occasion we do use other platforms but Mathematica is a core component of our offer to clients.
We have evaluated and are using in some cases the Python language in concert with the Jupyter notebook interface. For UI, we using libraries like React to create visually stunning visualizations of such models.

Mathematica compares favorably to this alternative in terms of speed of development. Mathematica compares unfavorably to this alternative in terms of license costs.
Well suited for:
  • A data science or analytics team performing analysis in support of a business problem
  • Building a sandbox for corporate analytical capability
  • Rapid prototyping of ideas for helpful applications of scientific/engineering/technical approaches
  • Building intelligent algorithms that underlie systems or web applications

Less appropriate for:
  • Full scale web application development
  • User interface development

Mathematica Feature Ratings

Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
9
Report Formatting Templates
9
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Delivery to Remote Servers
10