math software - What should I learn first, Mathematica or MatLab?

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What should I learn first, Mathematica or MatLab?

I have a non-professional interest in math and I would like to be able to be curious and play
around with some math that I'm learning about (both here and from calculus-and-higher level Welcome!
30 math classes). This is a collaboratively edited
question and answer site for
Mathematica and MatLab seem like the best ways to play with math. I've seen demos of both and
people studying math at
they both seem exceptionally powerful and complex. I'd like to start learning more about the any level and
15 syntax of one or the other so I can develop ideas and evaluate them, but I don't know which is professionals in related
better suited for me. Which one should I use? fields. It's 100% free, no
registration required.
( math-software ) ( mathematica ) ( matlab )
Got a question about the site
share improve this question edited Jul 21 '10 at 17:14 asked Jul 20 '10 at 22:17 itself? meta is the place to talk
Nick about things like what
278 1 5 12 questions are appropriate,
what tags we should use, etc.
about »    faq »   meta »
3   Given that both Mathematica and MatLab are fairly expensive and Wolfram Alpha (wolframalpha.com) is
free, I'd suggest starting with Wolfram Alpha (which may or may not lead you into Mathematica), and
switching to a desktop application when you hit the limits of what Wolfram Alpha can do. (This doesn't
tagged
actually answer your question, though.) – Isaac Jul 20 '10 at 22:28
( matlab )  × 328
1   What is your opinion about learning how to use Excel properly? Using a spreadsheet to explore complicated ( math-software )  × 307
behaviors (multiple iterations, function evaluations over a multidimensional domain, etc.) can be far more
( mathematica )  × 185
enlightening than simply staring at the output of a Matlab script. The spreadsheet also has the advantage of
forcing one to carefully consider their question - I often find that the most important question is "What
relationship am I really concerned with?". – Tom Stephens Jul 20 '10 at 22:29 asked 2 years ago
viewed 10486 times
4   a open source alternative to mathematica: maxima. – Chao Xu Jul 20 '10 at 22:39 active 4 months ago
Mehper C. Palavuzlar post is pretty accurate from what I know. All I wanted to add was that it's also very
arraigado, afianzado
domain specific. In Brain Imaging where I work currently, Matlab is entrenched. Other fields differ. Have
you considered Maple? – nkassis Aug 11 '10 at 4:14 Community Bulletin
blog Podcast #45 – Keeping it
1   Hmm, first time I saw this. My advice would have been to be "language-agnostic": learn concepts and Sharp
techniques that are independent of a particular computing environment. Then you can easily make
correspondences (e.g. MATLAB's 1:n is Mathematica 's Range[n] and Maple's seq(i, i=1..n) ). You
can worry about the subtle differences later when you've gotten good at being language agnostic. – J. M. Sep
13 '10 at 21:43

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The comparison between Matlab and Mathematica is NOT numeric versus symbolic as some
claim. It is 'high level complete system' versus 'low level core with specialist toolboxes'.
Mathematica can do all the numeric math and matrix work that Matlab can do, as fast and as
accurately. Matlab is almost strictly a subset of the functionality of Mathematica.

Much of the wider functionality for Matlab is sold as additional toolboxes. e.g. Matlab has
toolboxes for curve fitting, statistics, optimization, symbolic math, PDEs, Image acquisition etc

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/153/what-should-i-learn-first-mathematica-or-matlab[3/19/2013 3:37:07 AM]

math software - What should I learn first, Mathematica or MatLab? - Mathematics

but ALL of these areas of functionality are built in to Mathematica already. Aside from the cost
and inconvenience of making you buy every function that you need separately, the Matlab
design means that the core is inherently low level (since it cannot call on any of the toolbox
functionality in case you have not purchased that toolbox), and many of these functions do not
fit well together (e.g. no toolbox function can be used with symbolic parameters as they are all
written using the numeric-only Matlab core).

Matlab's only comparative strength lies in some of its specialist toolboxes (e.g. control theory Related
where it is dominant) but if you are not in that specialism, those are of no use.
find minimum of a function defined by
integration in Mathematica
Some specific differences between the core systems:
Finding positive integer solutions to
functions with only positive integer
Matlab is machine precision numeric only with some support for complex arithmetic - all input
Mathematica functions support machine precision and arbitrary precision real and
complex arithmetic, exact arithmetic and symbolic computation. Find equation of curve fit
programmatically in Matlab?
Matlab basic data model is 2D (matrices) with a pointer mechanism to emulate higher
Comparing integral resolutions using
dimensions - Mathematica basic data model handles any dimensionality without extra Wolfram Alpha / Mathematica
work.
Matlab: Website with a lot of functions
Many of Mathematica's functions switch automatically between different algorithms (with to download
a manual overide) - in Matlab you must always choose the algorithm.
In this Cholesky Algorithm in matlab,
Matlab requires you to manually linearize ODEs to a system of first order equations what is the abs function doing
before it can solve them - Mathematica accepts any order ODE. Got to learn matlab
Matlab can do integration up to only three dimensions (with triplequad) Mathematica Exporting a matrix in Mathematica in
handles n-dimensional integration for any n. curly brackets format
Matlab's language is procedural only (rather like higher level FORTRAN) - Mathematica Tupper's self-referential formula with
allows programming in procedural, functional, object oriented and rule based styles. Mathematica
Matlab has text interface and a basic home grown IDE - Mathematica has text interface, Does MATLAB take care of sparsity
document interface, GUI tools, and full Eclipse based IDE. itself?
Help need in Mathematica or Sage
Help needed with something like
Matlab Solver or Mathematica Solver
share improve this answer edited Aug 16 '10 at 7:10 answered Jul 21 '10 at 7:20
What is the “Mathematica” function
Mehper C. Palavuzlar
for plotting a single variable
681 2 9 20 inequality?
How to parallelize integrating in
5   Although the functionality of Matlab is almost a subset of that of Mathematica, it is incorrect to say that Mathematica
"Matlab's only comparative strength lies in some of its specialist toolboxes. Matlab uses a compact readable Solution of a system of equations in a
notation for the types of numerical array operation it is commonly used for. The corresponding Mathematica finite field using Mathematica
notation is often highly verbose and, also important, can look very unnatural when compared to standard How to plot z= 5-\sqrt{x^2+y^2}, 0 \le
mathematical notation. – sigfpe Jul 21 '10 at 18:00 z \le 5 in mathematica?
Help Plotting in Mathematica
8   When you exactly copy and paste some text as an answer, I think you should indicate it more clearly. Many
users might think that these are your own words. – AgCl Aug 11 '10 at 17:28 Is Sage on the same level as
Mathematica or Matlab for graph
theory and graph vizualization?
2   @AgCl: If readers read my answer till the end, they can easily see the source. There are loads of copy/paste
answers on Stackexchange sites and most of them don't indicate a source. I'm indicating the source at the Numerical solution in Matlab or any
other solver
end of my answer clearly. If you downvote an answer just because it is a copy, you should really consider the
content rather than it's a copy or not. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar Aug 12 '10 at 7:30 What is Mathematica option to check
whether trigonometric equality is true
5   Mehper, it's fine to quote (though I'm not sure about copying an entire blog post!), but it's simply unethical or false?
to not make it clear that you're doing so. Please don't do this. :( – ShreevatsaR Aug 12 '10 at 10:39 MATLAB Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattice
model can't force periodic boundary
3   This is a very old thread but this goes for the record: Apparently the author of the blog post did not use condition
Matlab at all. The toolboxes,as claimed, are nowhere to be found in Mathematica, except for aesthetical Mathematica manipulate to Sage
cases. The claim that functionality is a subset of the Mathematica is pure ignorance. I used both for at least interact
10 years and both are typical commercial products. There is no point comparing them. Matlab owns the Visualization of Cantor set by
domain with hardware-in-the-loop environments and that is the largest part of its customer portfolio, Mathematica or Maple!
finance etc. is for Mathematica. – user13838 Feb 24 '12 at 23:47

show 3 more comments

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/153/what-should-i-learn-first-mathematica-or-matlab[3/19/2013 3:37:07 AM]

math software - What should I learn first, Mathematica or MatLab? - Mathematics

As someone who uses both Matlab and Mathematica regularly, I'd like to give some strengths of
Matlab over Mathematica (since Mehper C. Palavuzlar gave such a good overview of
23 Mathematica's strengths over Matlab)

You can make Matlab scripts fully stand-alone. Yes, it will be a 500 MB executable for a
program that prints "Hello World", but it can be run by someone who doesn't have Matlab.
This also makes it possible to run your calculations in parallel on a server farm like Amazon's
EC2 (is it even possible to use EC2 for Mathematica's computations?)

Matlab has a much larger and more active community. There are more Matlab blogs out there
to browse for tips and you can get answers to questions on Matlab Central within 10 minutes
sometimes. Mathematica has a moderated newsgroup which is high quality, but slow --
because of moderation it typically takes one day for your question to be seen by other people

Bigger community means more ready-to-use code out there. For instance, I started using
Matlab for some visual recognition tasks, and I could get pretty much all the pieces for
segmentation, low level feature extraction, adaptive thresholding etc from the web, whereas
in Mathematica I would have to implement them from scratch. It's common for researchers
to publish Matlab code they used for their computations on their homepages, whereas I'm yet
to see anyone (at least in vision/statistics/optimization) publishing Mathematica code to go
with along with their papers

Matlab's language is easier to learn (and to debug!). Mathematica offers an "rewriting

system" paradigm unfamiliar to many, and even after years of programming in Mathematica
I occasionally run into unexpected behaviors due to some intricacy of the evaluation sequence

Overall, I'd recommend to go with Mathematica if you want to play around by yourself, and
Matlab if you want to share your code or use code of others.

share improve this answer edited Aug 11 '10 at 21:01 answered Aug 11 '10 at 0:51
Yaroslav Bulatov
1,181 4 16

Agree, but to comment, Mathematica has very good documentation and also a very extensive book written by
Stephen Wolfram himself about 970+ pages of details of Mathematica. But on the contrary, so does MatLab,
and that is what I use mostly to learn things. So all in all, both are great for self-learning although it will take
some effortless work and patience to learn shortcut and better algorithms and syntax to perform certain
tasks as with any language. – night owl Jun 3 '11 at 11:57

4   Mathematica now also has a stackexchange :) – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Apr 19 '12 at 15:25

As a free/libre alternative to Mathematica, you may want to have a look at Sage for Python.

18 As a free/libre alternative to MATLAB, which duplicates almost all of its functionality, have a look
at GNU Octave.

That said, Mathematica is a beautiful system that has no equal.

share improve this answer edited Aug 15 '10 at 21:20 answered Jul 21 '10 at 0:13
msutherl
303 1 6

10   Sage is the way of the future. – Noah Snyder Jul 21 '10 at 16:56

1  Python is the way of the past. – msutherl Aug 14 '10 at 18:34

1  Octave is the way of the present. – timur Nov 6 '12 at 4:38

Yes, but Octave doesn't fully implement all the functionalities of Matlab. – Ricky Robinson Feb 5 at 15:02

Conventional wisdom is that Matlab is the natural choice for numerical computation, whereas
Mathematica is better for symbolic calculation and manipulation. Both can do both, and it's
8 probably a matter of taste and the convention in the fields you're interested in. Matlab is much

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math software - What should I learn first, Mathematica or MatLab? - Mathematics

more widely used across the sciences and engineering, so if you've any interest in that direction, it
might be more helpful for you to know.

share improve this answer answered Jul 20 '10 at 22:22

Jamie Banks
2,607 1 19 28

On a slightly different angle, Matlab is widely used in engineering, while Mathematica is more
used among mathematicians. If I had to learn just one, I'd go with the one most used in my field.
4
Mathematica is also much cheaper for personal use (I think they have a licence for a few hundred
dollars for home use, and even cheaper versions for students).

share improve this answer answered Jul 21 '10 at 14:24

Bossykena
193 4

For students, Matlab is also pretty cheap and includes most of the important toolboxes as well as Simulink.
– walkytalky Jul 21 '10 at 16:59

1   @walkytalky: Right, most toolboxes but not all=expensive choice in the long run. I say go open source
(octave). – night owl Jun 3 '11 at 12:03

If you have prior programming experience, Matlab will probably seem more intuitive.
problemático
Mathematica's notions about structure, layout and order of execution can often be vexing to the
3 coder mindset -- as can its set of operators, which we might charitably describe as rich.

Similarly, the notion that it is helpful for programs to resemble what a mathematician might
scrawl on a piece of parchment, with a quill pen, is one you will either love or hate...

share improve this answer answered Jul 21 '10 at 17:09

walkytalky
214 4 11

It seems you want to give it a try and play around a while before you jump into, if at all,
seriously. I recommend you learn Python. Then use Sage. You'll have lot of fun, I bet. It's
3 awesome. Learning python not only will lead you to sage, it'll lead you to several other python
based computing environments. See python's website for further reference.

share improve this answer answered Sep 13 '10 at 18:56

Sazzad Bin Kamal
121 8

Both softwares are robust and useful based on my experience. It isn't fair to say one is absolutely
the best and the other one should be fed to the dogs. I suggest trying both (if you're a student,
2 you typically can get it free or discounted) and seeing which one feels more natural. I believe it is
better to learn something that can do anything mathematical (Yes, both Mathematica and Matlab
can do the same stuff) extremely well and adapt to a specific problem then to only become
marginally good at both, despite a clear advantage of application. In context to school, you
probably only have a limited time to learn any of the languages so you might as well use one and
become an expert at it.

share improve this answer answered Nov 6 '12 at 2:50

Daniel Bittinat
21 1

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/153/what-should-i-learn-first-mathematica-or-matlab[3/19/2013 3:37:07 AM]

math software - What should I learn first, Mathematica or MatLab? - Mathematics

MatLab is a numerical computing environment. Mathematica is about symbolic manipulations.

0 Mathematica helped me with calculus and some number theory problems. Almost everything I
need is built into Mathematica, i can't say the same for MatLab. The math professors in my
school uses maple(closer to mathematica than matlab).

You can have the good of both worlds, there are mathematica toolbox for matlab.

If you find the problems on project euler interesting, mathematica are something you want to
look into.

share improve this answer answered Jul 20 '10 at 22:37

Chao Xu
1,857 8 25

Isn't a Maple library built into Matlab? – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Jul 21 '10 at 0:51

@BlueRaja I thought Maple only provide a toolbox for MatLab, like Mathematica. – Chao Xu Jul 21 '10 at 1:23

Blue Raja: Not anymore. It used to be the case, but Mathworks have their own symbolic toolbox now.
– Bossykena Jul 21 '10 at 14:21

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