My First Week of Wolfram Engine

Last week I started my journey with the Wolfram Language… for free! Wolfram’s Mathematica, arguably the world’s most powerful mathematics & general computation program, comes at a $200/year price tag even for individuals, and a curious student like myself could hardly wait until my future university pays for it.

But, interestingly enough, the exact same kernel engine used by Mathematica can be downloaded and launched free of charge for non-commercial purposes. You lose the dynamic, fluid integration with the notebook UI, but also the $200 subscription.

It took an hour of debugging to wire it up to Jupyter Notebook, and resolve kernel connection issues, but soon it was good to go (Wolfram’s utillity repo solved the issue).

Grossly exaggerating, if several centuries of knowledge is somehow crafted to fit inside 7.73 gigabytes, this would be it. Wolfram’s ambitious motto of delivering the computational future made a lot more sense.