The Joy of Mathematica 3.0

Fred Shultz and Alan Shuchat
Mathematics Department
Wellesley College, Wellesley MA 02181
fshultz@wellesley.edu, ashuchat@wellesley.edu

Design Goals

Allow new or inexperienced users to
	1.  Learn Mathematica easily
	2.  Use Mathematica quickly and "out of the box", or
	3.  Use Mathematica only occasionally.

What is Joy?

•Software +  book.

•The software allows Mathematica to be used by  means of menus (and/or palettes) and dialogs (as well as by typing commands.)  

•Menus and dialogs cover roughly the 50 most common Mathematica commands.  (See the handout.)

• Joy covers most of the the first two years of college mathematics  (e.g. Calculus, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra.) (See the handout.)

•The book is a manual for the software and an introduction to using Joy and Mathematica for mathematics and its applications to other fields.

Who uses Joy?

•Students (in mathematics and in other fields) in high school, college, graduate school.

•Professors in scientific fields who use Joy and the book for assignments, labs, etc. to expand the reach of their courses and facilitate understanding.

•Professors and professionals in less technical fields and those not wanting to invest a lot of time learning Mathematica.

• Japanese translation.

Joy 3.0

• Joy 1.0 was a purely Macintosh program external to Mathematica, compatible with Mathematica 1.2 through 2.2, but not 3.0.  

• Joy 3.0 is being written as a combination of custom Mathematica palettes, menus,  dialogs and packages.

• It makes use of Mathematica's front end language to create the usual elements of a customized user interface: radio buttons, checkboxes, menus, etc.

• Because Joy is now part of Mathematica, it will run on any platform for which  Mathematica 3.0 and the notebook interface is available.

• Because Joy is now part of Mathematica, users can enter expressions using Mathematica's typesetting language.

• Joy supplements rather than replaces the traditional front end.  All features of the front end remain available.

Technical Issues

• Radio buttons, checkboxes, palettes, menus have the appearance and behavior one expects.

• Popup menus have the needed functionality but until 3.1 are slightly non-standard, in that the menu pops up only after the mouse button is released.

Demonstration