Just received: A Great Mathematica Reference

Today the UPS man dropped off my newest toy, Keikki Ruskeepää’s hefty guide, Mathematica Navigator, 2/e. Not only is it chock full of useful, well-explained examples [Bayesian statistics and MCMC algorithms in Chapter 27, oh joy!], but it’s great reading. Chapter 1 reels you in from the start:

In 1903 at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, F.N. Cole read a paper entitled "On the Factorization of Large Numbers." When called upon to speak, Cole walked to the board and, saying nothing, raised two to its sixty-seventh power and subtracted one from the answer. Then he multiplied, longhand, 193,707,721 by 761,838,257,287 and the answers agreed. Without having said a word, Cole sat down to a standing ovation. Afterwards he announced that it had taken him twenty years of Sunday afternoons to factorize the Mersenne prime 2^67-1.

Based on Ruskeepää’s example, I tried it on my trusty home PC:

2^67 – 1
147573952589676412927

FactorInteger[%] // Timing
{0.015 Second, {{193707721, 1}, {761838257287, 1}}}

Ain’t computers wonderful?

The $69.95 price tag is about the going rate for a Mathematica book, but this one has a bonus: the entire book is also provided as a Mathematica notebook on a companion CD, gratis. What a deal.