{"id":4701,"date":"2012-12-14T22:56:22","date_gmt":"2012-12-14T21:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4701"},"modified":"2012-12-14T22:58:27","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T21:58:27","slug":"got-mathematica-questions-try-mathematica-stackexchange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4701","title":{"rendered":"Got Mathematica questions? Try Mathematica StackExchange."},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the best ways to learn how to use a piece of software such as Mathematica<\/a> is simply to dive in and start using it.\u00a0 If you get lost, consult the documentation<\/a> and if you get really lost, ask for help…..but who to ask?<\/p>\n

Ideally, you’d need a group of people who are friendly, knowledgeable and always around–no matter what time of day or night it is.\u00a0 Wouldn’t that be great? It would be even better if they were to offer you all of this help and expertise for free.\u00a0 Oh, and let’s have the moon on a stick<\/a> while we’re at it.<\/p>\n

The Mathematica StackExchange<\/a> community offers Mathematica users all of the above requirements apart from the mounted satellite.\u00a0 Based upon the same technology as the immensely popular Stack Overflow<\/a> question and answer site for software developers, Mathematica StackExchange has over 3000 active Mathematica users.\u00a0 Between them, these users have asked, and answered, over 4000 questions on almost every aspect of Mathematica you can imagine and then some.<\/p>\n

A matter of reputation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every user on Mathematica StackExchange has a reputation level which is essentially a measure of how much the rest of the community trusts that user.\u00a0 Users are awarded reputation points (by other users) both for asking good questions and writing good answers which means that you don’t have to be a Mathematica master in order to succeed…inquisitive neophytes can also build up a solid level of reputation.\u00a0 More details on the reputation system can be found at the site’s Frequenty Asked Questions<\/a> section.<\/p>\n

Starters for 10<\/strong><\/p>\n

To get a flavour of the site, I recommend taking a look at a few highly rated Q+As such as Where can I find examples of good Mathematica programming practice?<\/a>, xkcd-stye graphs<\/a> and How can I use Mathematica’s graph functions to cheat at Boggle?<\/a>\u00a0 Alternatively, take a browse through the list of questions sorted according to the number of votes they’ve recieved<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Before you ask a question of your own, it is recommended that you search the site to ensure that you’re not asking something that has been asked, and answered in the past.\u00a0 Once that’s done feel free to ask away– you don’t even need to create an account and log-in (although it is highly recommended that you do)!<\/p>\n

Make friends and influence people<\/strong><\/p>\n

I signed up for Mathematica StackExchange a couple of months ago (My profile’s here<\/a>) but have only started using it in earnest for the last few weeks and I only wish I had started earlier.\u00a0 Although I like to think that I know Mathematica pretty well, I’ve learned a lot more about it in a very short time from some very smart people.\u00a0 I’ve also had a lot of fun, met some great people and maybe helped a few people out along the way.<\/p>\n

So, if you have a Mathematica problem, and no one else can help, maybe you should try Mathematica StackExchange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the best ways to learn how to use a piece of software such as Mathematica is simply to dive in and start using it.\u00a0 If you get lost, consult the documentation and if you get really lost, ask for help…..but who to ask? Ideally, you’d need a group of people who are friendly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math-software","category-mathematica"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1dP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4701"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4707,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4701\/revisions\/4707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}