To access the Preferences dialog, you need to select Edit | Preferences… in the application menu.

Let's review the most interesting settings of the system, which will be useful for our further work:

In the Appearance | Number | Formatting tab, you can select various numeric formatting options. Will there be a space separator between the digit blocks? What should be the decimal point character? How many digits will be displayed by default in the output?

In the next Multiplication tab, you can select the appearance of the multiplication:

In this tab, you can choose whether the multiplication symbol between the multiplied numbers appears automatically, as well as choose the symbol type: space, center dot, *, or x.

The Wolfram system has a modular structure and consists of two main parts. The one that directly performs all computations is called the kernel; the other part that interacts with the user is called the front end.

The kernel can be installed on the server, and it processes requests from multiple user interfaces. However, the single user interface can use several connected kernels for its computations.

In order to connect multiple kernels, navigate to Evaluation | Kernel Configuration Options… and click on the Add button.

In the dialog window that opens, you can select whether the kernel will be located on a local computer or on a remote computer in the network. You can also enter the parameters in order to connect to this computer. There is a capability to be always aware of which kernel was used for computations.

The front end has the following interfaces:

At the beginning, it should be mentioned that Wolfram Mathematica has a very extensive reference system. You can access it by selecting in this menu: Support | Wolfram Documentation:

Let's get acquainted with some distinctions of Mathematica that will help us to understand the source code in the following chapters.

Let's create our first notebook. When Mathematica starts, you should choose New Document and then Notebook.

In order to compute any expression, press Shift + Enter after entering it. The input expression will be denoted by In and the output by Out:

In[1]:= 1 + 4
Out[1]= 5

All built-in functions always start with a capital letter, as shown here:

No variables should start with a number, since it will automatically be treated as a multiplication operation. They cannot end with a $ symbol.

If the variable ends with _, then it is a template expression and it can be substituted with anything, for example:

In Mathematica, there are four types of brackets:

In Mathematica, there are two types of assignments: absolute (=) and delayed (:=).

The difference is that in a delayed assignment, the right-hand side of the expression is always recomputed if the function is called. In an absolute assignment, the value that was in place during the assignment is stored.

In this example, we see that at the time of the second call of variables, x2 adopted the current time value. At the same time, x1 remained unchanged.

In order to use the result of the preceding expression, one can use the % symbol:

The basis of the Mathematica language is the functional form of all the expressions. In order to see a complete expression, the FullForm function should be used:

The variables that are not used should be cleared by the Clear function. Otherwise, computation errors will occur:

In this chapter, we learned how to install the Wolfram Mathematica software and reviewed the basic components of the system: front end and kernel. We also gained a knowledge of the Mathematica language features.

In the next chapters, we will review additional features and techniques that facilitate work in Mathematica.