# All Questions

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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 inject an evaluated expression into a held expression? [duplicate]

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: ...
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### How to pass a symbol name to a function with any of the Hold attributes?

Given a function with the attribute HoldFirst, HoldAll or similar, and a variable, list, how ...
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### How to avoid returning a Null if there is no “else” condition in an If contruct

I need to use If but with only one option that is if "a" then do "b", else do nothing. So I wrote If[a,b] but the problem is ...
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### List-operations only when restrictions are fulfilled (Part 1)

Consider the following: ...
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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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### Generating evenly spaced points on a curve

In the KnotData package a simple command such as points = Table[KnotData[{3, 1}, "SpaceCurve"][t], {t, 0, 2 Pi, 0.1}]; will ...
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### Partition a set into subsets of size $k$

Given a set $\{a_1,a_2,\dots,a_{lk}\}$ and a positive integer $l$, how can I find all the partitions which includes subsets of size $l$ in Mathematica? For instance, given ...
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### Extract current viewing parameters from a 3D view?

Is there a way to find out the current viewing parameters of a 3D view? What often happens is that I create a view, for example: ...
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### How can I get the unchanged Box form of an arbitrary expression?

One may observe that MakeBoxes does not give the actual Box form of various expressions: MakeBoxes[{1*^4, 000123, a*b c}] ...
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### 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 ...
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### What is the most efficient way to add rows and columns to a matrix?

Say I have a matrix m and a vector v. ...
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### How to calculate scalar curvature Ricci tensor and Christoffel symbols in Mathematica?

I am seeking a convenient and effective way to calculate such geometric quantities. I've used packages like TensoriaCalc, but they don't work at all time. ...
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### 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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### Common subexpression from two expressions

I am working with some unpleasantly tedious polynomials, which need to be manipulated in various ways (integrate with respect to some variable, differentiate with respect to another). Since these ...
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### 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 ...
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### What is the difference between Set and SetDelayed?

I have a problem with defining a function and most of time I get confused by Set or = and ...
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### Usage of Assuming for Integration

For some reason, when I enter the following integration in Mathematica Assuming[{k ∈ Integers}, Integrate[ Exp[ I k t], {t, -π, π}]] the result turns out to be ...
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### Using Evaluate and Evaluated -> True in Plot

A few use cases: (1) This, as expected, returns (almost) immediately: f[x_?NumericQ] := Evaluate[(Pause[1]; x)] Plot[f[x], {x, 0, 1}] (2) This takes ...
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### ParallelTable and Table do not give same result

I have a question regarding the use of Parallelize. In the help one can read that “Parallelize[Table[expr,iter, …]] (which is ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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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### Torn edge paper effect for images

In my answers to Plotting Error Bars on a Log Scale I used a so called "torn edge" effect from on one of the images. @SjoerdC.deVries commented: "BTW I liked the ripped-out look of your InputForm ...
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### Plotting implicitly-defined space curves

It is known that space curves can either be defined parametrically, \begin{align*}x&=f(t)\\y&=g(t)\\z&=h(t)\end{align*} or as the intersection of two surfaces, ...
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### Map a function across a list conditionally

It seems that this is a really basic question, and I feel that the answer should be obvious to me. However, I am not seeing. Can you please help me? Thanks. Suppose I have a list of data ...
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### How to make MapAt work with Span?

Span (;;) is very useful, but doesn't work with a lot of functions. Given the following input ...
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### Resource management in Mathematica

I am using a library that has functions like createSomeObject[] and deleteSomeObject[obj]. It is an interface to a C language ...
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### Point Renderings Slightly Off in Mathematica

The Mathematica code ...
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### 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 ...
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### How can I make threading more flexible?

Threading automatically with Listable functions requires the argument expressions to have the same length (or for one of them to be atomic). For nested lists the ...
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### Generating a broken or snipped axis in ListPlot

I have two data sets, data1 and data2. For example: ...
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### 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: ...
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### How to get the real PlotRange using AbsoluteOptions?

The problem in general involves the unreliable behaviour of AbsoluteOptions when option values are implicitly specified (e.g. ...
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### Optimising 2D binning code

I have a set of (x,y,z) data, 45,000 to be precise and I want to bin the z values in 256 equidistant bins based on their (x,y) values. The final array should be a set of 256x256 array with each slot ...
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### How to find rows that have maximum value?

Suppose if I have following list { {10,b,30}, {100,a,40}, {1000,b,10}, {1000,b,70}, {100,b,20}, {10,b,70} } How to find rows that have max value in ...
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### How to make traditional output for derivatives

Hello again after some pause. i have a problem how to present partial derivatives in traditional form, not as Mathematica gave it to me in its notation. So I want to present this ...
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### 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: ...
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### Meaning of backtick in floating-point literal

If I compute, say, 1/3//N, Mathematica displays 0.333333 as the result. When I copy that output to use elsewhere, the paste ...
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### 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 ...
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### Combined numerical minimization and maximization

I want to numerically calculate the maximum of a function defined by the minimization of another function, like the following: ...
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### Automatically load packages at startup

I'm a physics student and I try to simplify my day with Mathematica. Every time I use Mathematica I need Div[], Grad[], ...
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### Create complicated text formulas in graphics

I want to put somewhat complicated, or at least non-standardly formatted, text on some of my graphics. For example, I'd like to be able to use f^[4](x) (where the ...
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### Profiling from Mathematica

I've always wished I could do some profiling like you get in Wolfram Workbench, but directly from Mathematica, without using or having Workbench. If it is possible, how can I do it?
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### Calling MATLAB from Mathematica

How can I call MATLAB functions directly from Mathematica and transfer data/variables between the two systems?
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### How to distribute proprietary Mathematica code

If I want to make package-code completely unreadable, in a way that the end-user can only call my functions, but has no way to re-engineer my definitions, how would I do that? I know I can use ...