Note that this version is free for non-commercial use only. If you decide to use another Debian-based distribution, you can download it on your Pi. Mathematica was closed source and expensive for a college student, so it was a nice surprise to see almost 20 years later Wolfram bundling a version of Mathematica with Raspbian and the Raspberry Pi. I spent a few hours a month in the lab learning the Wolfram Language and solving integrals and such on Mathematica. At the time, I was introduced to an application called Mathematica by Wolfram, where we would take many of our algebraic and differential equations from the blackboard into the computer. In the mid-'90s, I started college as a math major, and, even though I graduated with a computer science degree, I had taken enough classes to graduate with a minor-and only two classes short of a double-major-in math. If Wolfram wants to market this independently, then that is their perogative, but educational tools given to kids should be reuse- and remix-friendly. The platform should remain open to all, and putting something like this in a default install will perpetuate a system of haves and have-nots. I dearly wish that more of the RaspberryPI system could be Open Hardware, and love the fact that schoolchildren are getting their hands on their own computer that runs FOSS that they can program and tinker with and invent and dream.īut I dearly hope that the Foundation folks say 'Thanks but no thanks' to this offer of crippleware. I give the RaspberryPi folks credit for making amazing and fun toy for children (that turns out to actually be a quite powerful and useful system for all ages, but shhhh, don't tell the kids! :-).

(There’s also going to be a licensing mechanism for commercial uses, other Linux ARM systems, and so on.) As with Wolfram|Alpha on the web, the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on the Raspberry Pi are going to be free for anyone to use for personal purposes.

Raspbian mathematica