# All Questions

1k views

### Sizing cells in a GraphicsGrid/GraphicsRow

I would like to add a colour bar to a plot. I tried to use GraphicsRow for this. In a GraphicsRow, each item is given the same ...
348 views

### Using pure functions in Table

I need a table with the elements made of pure functions and list elements. This is a simplified example: I need a list as: ...
596 views

### Way to improve “show me this decimal number to M places, don't use scientific notation”?

The best way I can come up with to say "show me this fraction as a decimal number to M places, don't use scientific notation" is: ...
201 views

### Why do buttons with ChoiceDialog freeze the front end?

Pressing the button below will freeze my front end. An unpainted white dialog box comes up, then it completely freezes, and I need to forcibly kill the front end. CPU usage stays at zero during ...
2k views

### Metaprogramming in Mathematica

Being functional, and having no "quotation", i.e. essentially treating data and programs semantically same, Mathematica seems naturally capable of doing metaprogramming. But could anyone construct a ...
2k views

### Understanding CDF

Update Since more and more issues are revealed as I venture deeper into the world of CDF, I decided to make this thread more general and hopefully more useful. I know posted my findings as an answer, ...
799 views

### Extract values for ViewMatrix from a Graphics3D

Under More Information in the help page of ViewMatrix the following entry can be found With the setting ...
465 views

### How to “Copy as Unicode” from a Notebook?

I spent some time manually editing a post replacing Mathematica ASCII \[Alpha] with Unicode α. I did this by laboriously ...
696 views

I have been working on picking expressions apart using Head and Part and encountered a little mystery. Consider the canonical ...
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### How to change the default ColorData used in Mathematica's Plot?

This question leads on from the recent question What are the standard colors for plots in Mathematica? There it was determined that the default color palette used by ...
843 views

### Open Excel file with Mathematica

I would like to open an Excel file and manipulate it as a COM object. While I'm able to open an instance of excel with ...
756 views

### Generating a broken or snipped axis in ListPlot

I have two data sets, data1 and data2. For example: ...
291 views

### How to inject an evaluated expression into a held expression?

I know that there are methods to structurally manipulate held expressions (discussed e.g. here), but I failed to apply those for this particular problem: ...
434 views

### How to load a package without naming conflicts?

This question applies to any package, but I encountered this problem while working with graphs. There are symbols in the Combinatorica package (such as ...
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I tried ...
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### Why is ContourPlot not displaying this curve?

I am using the general form of a second-degree plane curve: $$Ax^2+2Bxy + Cy^2+2Dx + 2Ey + F = 0$$ I want to randomly generate plane curves of this form, so I am using ...
1k views

### Delete duplicate elements from a list

If a list contains duplicate elements, for example list = {a, 1, 5, 3, 5, x^2, x^2}, how can the duplicate elements be removed? The result would be ...
142k views

### xkcd-style graphs

I received an email to which I wanted to respond with a xkcd-style graph, but I couldn't manage it. Everything I drew looked perfect, and I don't have enough command over Plot Legends to have these ...
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### How can one find undocumented options or option values in Mathematica?

Mathematica has a lot of undocumented or poorly documented options. How does one go about working out if there is an undocumented option that might solve a particular problem? How does one work out ...
3k views

### How to compile effectively?

What are the best practices of compiling functions? I understand that this is a vague question, but let me list some aspects that might trigger useful answers. Some of these have already been answered ...
2k views

### Functions with Options

Suppose you want to create a function which has optional arguments. Maeder's book "Programming in Mathematica" covers the topic extensively up to version 3, but some things have changed/evolved since ...
2k views

### Recovering data points from an image

Unfortunately, some data can only be obtained in picture form (Japanese publications anyone?). Since this cannot be worked with, it has to be converted to a dataset that can; I was wondering whether ...
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### Minimal effort method for integrating C++ functions into Mathematica

As of Mathematica 8, what is the minimal effort way to integrate an existing C++ function into Mathematica? I think we have these: MathLink (it was quite long ago I used it last time) communication ...
3k views

### How to check if a 2D point is in a polygon?

Background: I use code from An Efficient Test For A Point To Be In A Convex Polygon Wolfram Demonstration to check if a point ( mouse pointer ) is in a ( convex ) polygon. Clearly this code fails for ...
641 views

### Automatically generating a dependency graph of an arbitrary Mathematica function?

Has anyone written a function to pull the function dependencies of a function? That is, it would be nice to have a function that returns a list of function dependencies as a set of rules, terminating ...
763 views

This is my oldest question on SO. It still hasn't generated a useful answer there, so I thought I'd give it a try here. The question was: I don't seem to be able to find the method to generate the ...
393 views

### How to avoid nested With[]?

With[ {v1 = #}, With[ {v2 = f[v1]}, g[v1, v2] ] ] How to avoid nested With[] like the above? I'd like to use ...
1k views

### Filling a polygon with a pattern of insets

I am trying to fill a shape with diagonal lines. I am aware of Texture, but it rasterizes the fill pattern, which is not desirable. Here was my crack at it: ...
405 views

### Do I have to code each case of this Grid full of plots separately?

I have written some custom functions to draw multi-panel graphs like this one: It's done by passing a matrix of (custom) plotting functions to a MultiPanelGraph ...
2k views

### ListPlot with each point a different color and a legend bar

I would like to generate a ListPlot with the color for each point in the plot corresponding to a particular value (not associated with the position in the plot). I'd then like to add a legend ...
737 views

### Aborting evaluation when the memory exceeds a certain limit

Sometimes when generating a lot of data the memory usage shoots beyond its physical realm and my laptop freezes. There is no way to stop Mathematica when this happens. Task manager (or its equivalent ...
471 views

What are some complete examples of what one would include in a FrontEnd init.m that would make use of FrontEnd`AddMenuCommands ...
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### How do you convert a string containing a number in C scientific notation to a Mathematica number?

Suppose I have a string containing the C-representation of a floating point number, for example s = "1.23e-5" and I want to convert this to a Mathematica number. ...
883 views

### Antialiasing in 3D

Is it possible? Is it platform specific? Does it rely on the graphics hardware? Why does the antialiasing slider under Preferences > Appearance > Graphics do nothing? I remember seeing some ...
609 views

### Reading periodic elements from a large file

I have a large binary data file (big endian) with 100+ million "rows" of 11 elements, combination of floats and integers. This is the format: ...
407 views

### Quickly editing the stylesheet and saving it

I have a private stylesheet I'm using. I edit it by going to the menu Edit->Edit Stylesheet and then clicking on the private stylesheet cell. I can modify whatever I want but it never gets saved. The ...
682 views

### Does Mathematica support variable frame rate for any video format, in analogue of GIF-style “DisplayDurations”?

The good old GIF animation format allows us to set the duration of each individual frame in the animation separately. This is especially useful if some frames in ...
278 views

### Funny behaviour when plotting a polynomial of high degree and large coefficients

I am trying to plot a polynomial of degree 29 on the domain [0,1], with fairly large coefficients: ...
3k views

### Are you interested in purchasing David Wagner's “Power programming with Mathematica”?

I recently contacted McGraw-Hill to see if they have a mechanism in place for printing out-of-print books that are still of interest. Specifically, I asked about "Power programming with Mathematica" ...
1k views

### Functional style using lazy lists?

Let's say I want to answer the question "what are the first 400 palindromic prime numbers?" The first approach that comes to my mind from the set of languages that I know is to use some sort of lazy ...
11k views

### How to make an inkblot?

How to effectively create a polygon that looks like a realistic inkblot? So far, I could come up with this (borrowing from Ed Pegg Jr.'s Rorschach demonstration): ...
5k views

### Labeling individual curves in Mathematica

I need to create a plot for export and inclusion in a report. Is there a better way to label curves than PlotLegends? From what I've read and my personal ...
600 views

### Once more on object orientation in Mathematica: does it have to be so hard?

Recently I came across a set of problems which would be solved most easily within an object-oriented approach. I first attempted to solve them by other means, but found the complexity of the code ...
652 views

### Partitioning with varying partition size

How can I partition a list into partitions whose sizes vary? The length of the $k$'th partition is a function $f(k)$. For example: if $l = \{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6\}$ and $f(k) = k$. Then the partitioning ...
839 views

### How to read data file quickly?

I have a tab separated value file with 10 million rows each of which has three tab separated values. The first value is a string, the second an integer, and the third another string. How to read ...
378 views

### Elegant manipulation of the variables list

I have a list of global variables (some of them are indexed variables), for example: varsH = Hold[U0[1], U0[2], B0, V0[1], V0[2]] Or (if it is easier to handle) ...
1k views

### Are there any cases when For[] loops are reasonable?

To my mind the only reason for the existence of For[] loops in Mathematica is to allow new users with some experience in procedural programming languages to write ...
641 views

### How can all those tiny polygons generated by RegionPlot be joined into a single FilledCurve?

RegionPlot will usually generate a large number of tiny polygons for filling the region: ...