Yep, not a great improvement in version number, but indeed a large
improvement in functionality, speed and bugfixes... Check out:

http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/07/mathematica_601_arrives.html

for more information...

"It's now two months since we released Mathematica 6, and I am happy to
say that all our years of development and testing seem to be paying off:
Mathematica 6 is a robust system that is performing excellently.

Looking at our internal development database, I see that 6.0.1 contains
259 individual code improvements relative to 6.0.0 (as well as a great
many documentation and tutorial updates).

What are they all? Well, they are distributed throughout the system (as
well as in an update to the free Mathematica Player) - reflecting the
continuing work of our many software development teams.

There are a few areas that we pushed hard to include in 6.0.1 on the
basis of feedback about 6.0.0. A leading example is the enhancement
of automatic and manual proxy settings for internet connectivity.

Connecting directly to the internet is a new capability for Mathematica,
and feedback indicated that we needed to make it easier for people to
handle complex internet connectivity setups. So, we have done this in
6.0.1.

Another area is legacy documentation. In Mathematica 6 we upgraded many
pieces of functionality from "standard packages" to built-in kernel
functions. The old standard package functions are still available for
compatibility - and now in 6.0.1 their documentation is fully searchable.

There are some good infrastructure improvements, too. After additional
testing time, we're now satisfied that we can release a change to the
low-level interprocess communication protocol we use - which improves
MathLink throughput by a factor of nearly 50 on Mac and Unix systems.

We've also made changes to our asynchronous process startup mechanism to
streamline the initialization of services such as the Mathematica in-
product help system.

Speaking of the help system, we've been adding many new function
examples and many tutorials, all of which are now available in 6.0.1.

We've also added many updates to our curated data for functions like
CountryData and FinancialData. Many of these appear automatically
whenever Mathematica connects to our servers, and all of them are
included in 6.0.1.

We are continually improving the core code of Mathematica, making it
more efficient, broader, and more robust. We made many such improvements
in 6.0.1 - for example, greatly increasing the performance of ListPlot,
ListPlot3D, and Plot3D for inputs involving a large number of data
points.

We're quite obsessive about the overall software quality of Mathematica,
hunting down every last bug - sometimes for years. For 6.0.1, we squashed
a whole range of bugs. To give a sense of what they were, here are a few
random examples: On 64-bit Windows, the front end could crash if the
contents of a Tooltip were insanely large.

On Linux systems with Firefox set as the default browser, hyperlinks
containing "&" would not work. And in some extreme cases on Intel
CPUs, RandomInteger with the non-default method MKL could return
values outside the prescribed bounds.

And, of course, everything you've created in Mathematica 6.0.0 will work
in Mathematica 6.0.1.

But a few new things will work too, and it'll be a little (or in a few
cases, a lot) faster."

Long recognized as the world's most powerful mathematical software system,
Mathematica has steadily grown in breadth and depth to become today an
unparalleled platform for all forms of computation.

Powering innovation in research, development, and education.

With thousands of original algorithms and a tightly unified overall design,
Mathematica spans projects of all sizes, from simple calculator operations
and educational demonstrations to large-scale systems deployment and
maximum-power supercomputing.

The most important advance in the 20 year history of Mathematica.

Building on two decades of world-class algorithm and software development,
Mathematica 6 represents a dramatic breakthrough that immensely broadens
Mathematicas scope and applicability, and redefines the very way we think
about computation.

Made possible by Mathematica's unique symbolic architecture, Mathematica 6
introduces a sweeping unification of language and interface concepts that
makes possible a new level of automation in algorithmic computation,
interactive manipulation and dynamic presentation, as well as a whole new
way of interacting with the world of data.

Mathematica 6.0 fundamentally redefines Mathematica and introduces a major
new paradigm for computation.

Building on Mathematica's time-tested core symbolic architecture, version
6.0 adds nearly a thousand new functions almost doubling the total number
of functions in the system, dramatically increasing both the breadth and
depth of Mathematica's capabilities, as well as introducing hundreds of
major original algorithms, and perhaps a thousand new ideas, large and
small.

Download File Size:512.2 MB

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