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I do. I started using Mathematica in middle school and continued from there. My initial use case was simply double-checking I did my math homework correctly. A lot of Solve, DSolve, FindInstance, Reduce, FullSimplify, etc. I did a lot of plotting to visualize things: not just plotting functions of one variable, but parametric curves, inequalities, functions of multiple variables. When I studied linear algebra, I implemented Gaussian elimination myself as a learning exercise and I was very proud of it: the nice thing was that although the algorithm worked on matrices containing known numbers, it automatically worked for matrices containing unknowns thanks to its symbolic computation. When I studied basic image processing tasks like edge detection or the like, it was again of great help. When I got into personal investing, I did yet more calculations using the FinancialData function to retrieve financial time series and backtested many kinds of portfolio. When I got into trading options, it was of tremendous help to learn options from first principles, starting from the log-normal distributions, implementing Black–Scholes modeling, and then implemented the option greeks (delta, gamma, theta, etc) from scratch. Even as a regular software engineer, when I needed to work on algorithms, Mathematica is great help when I needed to do complexities analysis more sophisticated than interview-level big-O notations. I even used it as a SAT solver in a pinch, or a linear programming solver, when I knew there are other tools, but they won't be as nice as Mathematica or have higher learning curves than Mathematica's builtin documentation. |