I’m excited to be able to announce that today we’re releasing Mathematica 9—and it’s big! A whole array of new ideas and new application areas… and major advances along a great many algorithmic frontiers.

Next year Mathematica will be 25 years old (and all sorts of festivities are planned!). And in that quarter century we’ve just been building and building. The core principles that we began with have been validated over and over again. And with them we’ve created a larger and larger stack of technology, that allows us to do more and more, and reach further and further.

From the beginning, our goal has been an ambitious one: to cover and automate every area of computational and algorithmic work. Having built the foundations of the Mathematica language, we started a quarter century ago attacking core areas of mathematics. And over the years since then, we have been expanding outward at an ever-increasing pace, conquering one area after another.

As with Wolfram|Alpha, we’ll never be finished. But as the years go by, the scope of what we’ve done becomes more and more immense. And with Mathematica 9 today we are taking yet another huge step.

So what’s new in Mathematica 9? Lots and lots of important things. An amazing range—something for almost everyone. And actually just the very size of it already represents an important challenge. Because as Mathematica grows bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more difficult for one to grasp everything that’s in it. Continue reading