Re: [math-fun] "Ponder This"

Keith F. Lynch: "I've heard good things about Mathematica. Too bad it's so expensive. I've been doing everything in C. I'm curious whether Mathematica is reasonably fast." I think Mathematica is a wonderful toy for the recreationalist (especially, with ready-made "black box" procedures for all manner of mathematical situations. For example, if I wanted to duplicate Bill Gosper's "representions of 31415 as sums of four squares" I'd use something like PowersRepresentations[31415,4,2]] and it might even be somewhat faster than his from-scratch procedure but, in general, I'll guess (based on C programmers trouncing my Mathematica-produced output in the past) that you can do things faster in C.