Mark McClure

14,126 reputation

2765

bio	website	facstaff.unca.edu/mcmcclur
	location	Asheville, NC
	age
visits	member for	1 year, 5 months
	seen	2 hours ago
stats	profile views	1,210

I've been a professor of mathematics at The University of North Carolina - Asheville since 1997. I've been using Mathematica since I started graduate school in mathematics at Ohio State in 1989. At that time, we used version 1.1 (as I recall) to teach calculus in our Calculus and Mathematica classes. I've used it pretty much continuously in my teaching and research since then.

In addition to my posts on SE, you can find some of my papers, teaching notebooks and other Mathematica based oddities strewn throughout my website.

In recent years, I've also worked as a part-time consultant to Wolfram Research focusing on development of mathematical content for WolframAlpha.

	14,126 reputation	bio	website	facstaff.unca.edu/mcmcclur	visits	member for	1 year, 5 months
2765 badges		location	Asheville, NC		seen	2 hours ago

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2d	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Import variables from excel
2d	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on City/Country Names by GeoLocation
2d	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Multi-dimensional integral in the complex plane with poles and essential singularity
2d	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on How could I define a function as the solution of equations in Mathematica?
2d	comment	Handling Overflow It would be nice to have more details about what you are doing. If you're iterating a polynomial, for example, there's a simple bound on the absolute value of the iterate, beyond which, you are guaranteed the orbit will diverge to Infinity. It's easy to incorporate this into a loop or a `NestWhileList`. One issue with `Check` is that the `Overflow[]` won't be detected until after it happens. That's way too late, if you're working with compiled code.
2d	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Working precision for each variable
2d	awarded	Enlightened
2d	awarded	Nice Answer
Jun 17	comment	Why wolframalpha.com can be more powerful than Mathematica sometimes? @OleksandrR. The statement that W\|A cares "less about the validity of the answer than Mathematica does" is simply untrue. Both W\|A and Mathematica are subject to rigorous quality analysis and W\|A results that are incorrect are treated as bugs.
Jun 17	comment	Why wolframalpha.com can be more powerful than Mathematica sometimes? It should probably be pointed out that `SumConvergence` returns only `True` or `False`, not a method used. Thus, clearly, W\|A does not use `SumConvergence` to obtain its result. There are any number of ways to check if the comparison test might be applicable - an examination of the result of `Series[u[n],{n,Infinity,9}]`, for example, reveals that the comparison test will be applicable in this case. More generally, W\|A does not simply translate queries into relevant Mathematica input. Even given valid Mathematica input yielding a result, that result might come from some other command.
Jun 10	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Shapley value and Mathematica
Jun 8	comment	How to scrape the headlines from New York Times and Wall Street Journal? @RodLm Yes, that is pretty awesome, isn't it. Mathematica's import/export is generally outstanding in two ways - the broad range of filetypes it works with and the way it consistently represents things in it's own language. You might also be interested in this question, which deals with importing HTML as XML.
Jun 7	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Accurately evaluating the hypergeometric function
Jun 7	revised	Plotting the results of iterating a function deleted 20 characters in body
Jun 7	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Preventing notebook cells from being broken across two pages when printing
Jun 6	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on Combining the second elements of a set of ordered pairs based on their first element
Jun 5	comment	Combining Graphics & ContourPlot using Show @0x4A4D That was the first thing I thought of. On Mac OS, at least, the borders of the individual polygons show up as in this question, which is not so attractive.
Jun 4	comment	Combining Graphics & ContourPlot using Show You can see that the area is under the contour shading by setting `ContourShading->None` in the `ContourPlot`.
Jun 4	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on How to get (fg)' = f'g + g'f?
Jun 4	comment	Large Number times Tiny Number I'm curious, where do numbers like `1234567891234567889998.5` come from? I mean, is it a real application? Or is it specifically a test of precision?