Whatever you do, it could benefit from the judicious application of computational analysis. If there is a standard of point of departure in this field, it is Wolfram’s Mathematica and there is a fresh release (video below) available that delivers an impressive range of new functionality.

“Democratizing computation is one of our enduring missions,” says Conrad Wolfram (a.k.a. not Stephen Wolfram). “We optimize what’s possible in each field, then empower specialists in other fields as well as consumers to harness it too.”

There are more than 400 new features in Mathematica 9, but the highlights read like this:

• The new Wolfram Predictive Interface, which dramatically improves navigation and discovery of Mathematica’s functionality—part of Wolfram’s Compute-as-You-Think initiative
• New graph and network analysis, including built-in links for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more
• Highly integrated units support, including free-form linguistic entry, conversions, and dimensional consistency checking across graphics and numeric and symbolic calculations
• Major new data science, probability, and statistics functionality, including survival and reliability analysis, Markov chains, queueing theory, time series, and stochastic differential equations
• R language fully integrated into Mathematica workflow for seamless data and code exchange
• 3D volumetric image processing and out-of-core technology that scales up performance to very large 2D and 3D images and video
• Integrated analog and digital signal processing

Mathematica 9 is available immediately for Mac OS X, Linux x86 and Windows XP/Vista/7/8. Pricing for mere mortals starts at $149 per year or $295 for a full license.

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