Mathematica is the world's most powerful global

computation system. First released in 1988, it has had a

profound effect on the way computers are used in technical
and other fields. In 2008, following a dramatic reinvention in
2007, Mathematica continued the momentum of innovation
by bringing major new application areas into its integrated
framework.

It is often said that the release of Mathematica marked the

beginning of modern technical computing. Ever since the
1960s individual packages had existed for specific
numerical, algebraic, graphical, and other tasks. But the
visionary concept of Mathematica was to create once and for
all a single system that could handle all the various aspects
of technical computing--and beyond--in a coherent and
unified way. The key intellectual advance that made this
possible was the invention of a new kind of symbolic
computer language that could, for the first time, manipulate
the very wide range of objects needed to achieve the
generality required for technical computing, using only a
fairly small number of basic primitives.

When Mathematica 1.0 was released, The New York Times

wrote that "the importance of the program cannot be
overlooked," and Business Week later ranked Mathematica
among the 10 most important new products of the year.
Mathematica was also hailed in the technical community as
a major intellectual and practical revolution.

At first, Mathematica's impact was felt

mainly in the physical sciences, engineering, and

mathematics. But over the years, Mathematica has become
important in a remarkably wide range of fields, technical
and otherwise. Mathematica is used today throughout the
sciences--physical, biological, social, and other--and counts
many of the world's foremost scientists among its
enthusiastic supporters. It has played a crucial role in many
important discoveries and has been the basis for thousands
of technical papers. In engineering, Mathematica has
become a standard for both development and production,
and by now many of the world's important new products rely
at one stage or another on Mathematica in their design. In
commerce, Mathematica has played a significant role in the
growth of sophisticated financial modeling, and is being
widely used in many kinds of general planning and analysis.
Mathematica has also emerged as an important tool in
computer science and software development: its language
component is widely used as a research, prototyping, and
interface environment.

The largest part of Mathematica's user

community consists of technical and other professionals. But

Mathematica is also heavily used in education, and there are
now many hundreds of courses--from high school to
graduate school--based on it. In addition, with the
availability of student versions, Mathematica has become a
popular and prestigious tool for students around the world.

The diversity of Mathematica's user base is striking. It spans

all continents, encompasses ages from below 10 on up, and
includes artists, composers, linguists, and lawyers, as well
as hobbyists from all walks of life.

Ever since Mathematica was first released, its user base has
steadily grown, and by now the total number of users is in
the millions. Mathematica has become a standard in a great
many organizations, and it is used today in all of the Fortune
50 companies, all of the 15 major departments of the U.S.
government, and all of the world's 50 largest universities.

At a technical level, Mathematica is widely regarded as a

major feat of software engineering. It is one of the largest
single application programs ever developed, and it contains
a vast array of new original algorithms and important
innovations. Several paradigms pioneered in Mathematica
have emerged as major directions in software thinking, and
each successive version of Mathematica has invariably
redefined the state of the art in a number of areas of
computing.

The development of Mathematica is the work of

a world-class team at Wolfram Research led since its

inception by Stephen Wolfram. The success of Mathematica
has allowed the company to focus on unusually long-term
goals, and to carry out a unique program of research and
development, as well as supporting the world's intellectual
community with a variety of important freely accessible
websites.

Over the years, the generality of Mathematica's

core design has steadily allowed it to expand its reach. From

its origins as a system used primarily for Mathematical and
technical computing, Mathematica has gradually emerged as
a major force in many other areas of computing. And with its
dramatic breakthroughs of 2007 and 2008, it now stands at
the end of its first two decades as the defining system for
the broad future of computation.