Basic Mathematica to be a Great Amateur Theoretical Physicist

For what follows these are good resources:

• Wolfram M athematica ® Tutorial Collection: CORE LANGUAGE, free download: http://www.wolfram.com/learningcenter/tutorialcollection/CoreLanguage/CoreLanguage.pdf
• Harald Höller, Introductory Tutorial to Mathematica 8, Free Download: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/harald.hoeller/content/studium/introductory_mathematica_8_tutorial_expand.pdf
• Megan Frary, (2008), Mathematica Tutorial. Free download: http://coen.boisestate.edu/bknowlton/files/2011/12/Mathematica-Tutorial-Megan-Frary.pdf
• Steven Tschantz, (2002), A Brief Mathematica Tutorial. Free download: http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~tschantz/m267sp03/mmatutorial.pdf
• Brian Washburn, Mathematica Tutorials. Free download: http://www.phys.ksu.edu/personal/washburn/Teaching/teaching.htm
• Bruce W. Atkinson, David L. Foreman, Introduction to Mathematica for Calculus Students. Free download: http://howard.samford.edu/uploadedFiles/Howard/Departments/Mathematics_and_Computer_Science/Mathematics/mathematica_tutorial.pdf
• Alan G. Isaac, (2014), An Economist’s Introduction to Mathematica. Free download: https://subversion.american.edu/aisaac/notes/mma-intro.pdf
• Youngjoo Chung, (2011), Tutorial on Symbolic Computing with Mathematica. Free download: http://scent.gist.ac.kr/downloads/tutorial/2011/3/Mathematica%20Tutorial.pdf

If you wish to buy a book, I recommend these:

• Nino Boccara, (2007), Essentials of Mathematica. Springer
• Sal Mangano, (2010), Mathematica Cookbook. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
• Jim Hoste, (2009), Mathematica Demystified. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
• Andry Grozin, (2014), Introduction to Mathematica for Physicists. Springer.

You should master these topics/skills before you move on:

This requires either Mathematica 8 or later, or the free Mathematica CDF Viewer, though the viewer cannot run the programs, (you can find that here). You will also need to download the MAST Writing Style into the folder SystemFiles/Front End/Stylesheets. You can download that here. Once you load this file into the folder rename it MAST Writing Style 3. Reload Mathematica and it will be there.

1. The Nature of Computer Algebra Systems
2. Getting Started with Mathematica
3. Notebooks and Cells
4. The Documentation System
5. Expressions and Expression Evaluation
6. Numbers and Their Representation
7. Using Mathematica as a Scratch Pad
8. Logic and Set Theory
9. Algebraic Calculations and Manipulation
10. Dimensional Analysis
11. Trigonometry
12. Polynomials
13. Defining Your Own Functions
14. Algorithms and Their Efficiency
15. Functional Operations
16. Computation as a Sequence of Small Steps
17. Patterns and Transformation Rules
18. Lists and Data Structures
19. Manipulating Lists
20. String and Text Processing
21. Matrices and Vectors
22. Equations and Inequalities
23. Gröbner Bases
24. Two-Dimensional Graphics
25. Graphics Primitives and Options
26. Drawing
27. Differential and Integral Calculus
28. The Risch Algorithm
29. Data Analysis and Statistics
30. Image and Audio Processing
31. Ordinary Differential Equations
32. Files
33. Programming in Mathematica
34. Scoping
35. Parallel Processing in Mathematica
36. Manipulate and Dynamic
37. Making Your Own GUI
38. Packages
39. Decidable Theories
40. Constructivity

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