Extensible Notations in Mathematica 3.0

Jason Harris

Date: July 20th (Saturday)
Time: 11:40-12:00
Abstract Traditionally the use of computer algebra systems has sometimes been limited in various fields even when applicable because once a problem is translated from the form in which the user thinks and works on paper into an ASCII representation suitable for the symbolic computation system most of the visual intuition is lost. It has long been a goal to allow the use of notations in which one thinks and works on paper to be used in symbolic computation.

In this talk I will present a new extension to Mathematica 3.0 that enables the easy and flexible creation of new notations. This allows the user to not only work in such a language but also to write and execute programs in this language / notation. This is of great benefit to the many users of who have specialized notations in their field of science.

Several basic examples will be given outlining the capabilities of this system. I will also discuss the limits of such a system and pose some questions for future systems... For illustration I will also briefly present some examples from Logic, Physics and Category Theory.

It is planned that Notation.m will ship as an 'Experimental' package with Mathematica 3.0.

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