[jiggawatts]

I used to use it when I was at University and I kept a copy around for nostalgic reasons. Once in a blue moon I get an excuse to use it for work related reasons, and then I gleefully spin it up just so I can pretend to be a real mathematician / scientist type person. Generally this is superfluous, but I do it anyway, otherwise my tertiary education feels like a waste of time and money.

Other times I use it as a replacement for a calculator app, which feels exactly like cracking a walnut with a 500-ton industrial press.

It does have some reasonably unique capabilities that I did use more heavily in the past. E.g.:

- Simplifying the vector/matrix mathematics used in 3D graphics. It can eliminate redundant expressions, which is especially useful when you know that some of the inputs are constants such as 0 or 1.

- Non-linear curve fitting. If you have some complicated mathematical model you want to fit to noisy data, Mathematica will "just do it". With every other tool out there, this is... sss... hard.

- It missed the AI boat, but it has mostly caught up and could now be a viable alternative to the Python-based AI ecosystem, especially for certain areas of research.

- Complicated plotting requirements where I just can't be bothered spinning up some dedicated log analytics "tool" or subscribing to a "cloud service" and learning an entire query language just to draw a 3D histogram or whatever.