Almost any workflow involves computing results, and that's what Mathematica does—from building a hedge fund trading website or publishing interactive engineering textbooks to developing embedded image recognition algorithms or teaching calculus. Mathematica is renowned as the world's ultimate application for computations. But it's much more—it's the only development platform fully integrating computation into complete workflows, moving you seamlessly from initial ideas all the way to deployed individual or enterprise solutions. After 8 versions and 22 years most software systems have decayed to slow and lumbering development. But not Mathematica. In fact, with Mathematica it’s quite the opposite.

As the years go by, Mathematica development is actually speeding up. Mathematica 8 introduces free-form linguistic input—a whole new way to compute. Enter plain English; get immediate results—no syntax required. It's a new entry point into the complete Mathematica workflow, now upgraded with 500 additional functions and 7 application areas—including the world's most advanced statistics capability and state-of-the-art image processing. New workflow end points include deployment of standalone applications or interactive documents. Numerics of any precision, symbolics, or visualization—Mathematica is the ultimate computational tool, with systemwide technology to ensure reliability, ease of use, and performance. Use Mathematica computation directly, as the engine in an infrastructure, or integrated into a standalone application.
Mathematica provides you with the world's largest collection of algorithms in a single system--each able to operate across the widest applicable scope of numeric, symbolic, or graphical input. With integrated symbolic computation, you can work directly on precise models--transforming, optimizing, solving, and visualizing--only substituting approximate or specific numerical values where necessary. Whether it's for simulation set-up or as part of a hybrid approach with numerics, integrated symbolic computation is now recognized as an essential element of any error-free engineering or scientific workflow. Mathematica is the world's leading symbolic computation system, both in functionality and integration with numerics.