This book is intended to be a complete introduction to Mathematica. It describes essentially all the capabilities of Mathematica, assuming no prior knowledge of the system. Mathematica is a system build on a fairly small set of very powerful principles. This book describes those principles, but by no means spells out all of their implications. This book describes the standard Mathematica kernel, as it exists on all computers that run Mathematica. Most major supported features of the kernel in Mathematica Version 5 are covered in this book. Many important features of the front end are also discussed. This book describes what readers should do when interacting directly with the standard Mathematica kernel and notebook front end. Mathematica is an open software system that can be customized in a wide variety of ways. It is important to realize that this book covers only the full basic Mathematica system. If the system readers are using has been customized in any way, then Mathematica may behave differently from what is described in this book.

Through his pioneering work in science, technology and language design, Stephen Wolfram has developed his own signature way of thinking about an impressive range of subjects. From science consulting for a Hollywood movie, solving problems of AI ethics, hunting for the source of an unusual polyhedron, communicating with extraterrestrials, to finding the fundamental theory of physics and exploring the digits of pi, Adventures of a Computational Explorer captures the infectious energy and curiosity of one of the great pioneers of the computational world.

"Combinators have inspired ideas about computation ever since they were first invented in 1920, and in this innovative book, Stephen Wolfram provides a modern view of combinators and their significance. Informed by his work on the computational universe of possible programs and on computational language design, Wolfram explains new and existing ideas about combinators with unique clarity and stunning visualizations, as well as provides insights on their historical connections and the curious story of Moses Schönfinkel, inventor of combinators. Though invented well before Turing machines, combinators have often been viewed as an inaccessibly abstract approach to computation. This book brings them to life as never before in a thought-provoking and broadly accessible exposition of interest across mathematics and computer science, as well as to those concerned with the foundations of formal and computational thinking, and with the history of ideas"--