Thirty years ago mathematical, as opposed to applied numerical,
computation was difficult to perform and so relatively little used.
Three threads changed that: the emergence of the personal computer; the
discovery of fiber-optics and the consequent development of the modern
internet; and the building of the Three "M's" Maple, Mathematica and
Matlab.
We intend to persuade that Mathematica and other similar tools are worth
knowing, assuming only that one wishes to be a mathematician, a
mathematics educator, a computer scientist, an engineer or scientist, or
anyone else who wishes/needs to use mathematics better. We also hope to
explain how to become an "experimental mathematician" while learning to
be better at proving things. To accomplish this our material is divided
into three main chapters followed by a postscript. These cover
elementary number theory, calculus of one and several variables,
introductory linear algebra, and visualization and interactive geometric
computation.