MATHEMATICAL & COMPUTER SCIENCES
Reproduced with permission from NeXT Computer, Inc.
A Reference Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช 1992 NeXT Computer, Inc
Over the past five years, hundreds of schools throughout the United States and Canada have initiated curriculum reform in their mathematics and computer science departments, to make classroom learning more meaningful and attainable and to better prepare students for the problems they'll face when they complete their education and move into industry careers.
Since the original NeXTcube was introduced four years ago, more than 200 of these schools-from Princeton to Ohio State to University of British Columbia-have set up NeXT learning labs for the mathematical sciences (and the number increases nearly every day). Using NeXT machines and tools like Mathematica-a powerful computational and modeling tool that comes bundled with every NeXT machine, students are able to explore, question, and solve real-world mathematical and computer science problems deemed unsolvable in the traditional classroom of just a few years ago.
Although Mathematica runs on many platforms, there's little dispute that NeXTSTEP is the best platform for running the application. It's the only workstation that supports the Mathematica Notebook front end; it's the only workstation that allows users to cut and paste PostScript graphics among all NeXTSTEP applications; it's the only platform that lets users build object-oriented front ends to Mathematica.
An added bonus to the computationally-intensive tools like Mathematica and Maple V` for algebraic manipulation, is NeXT's innovative Mach operating system-a true boon for computer science students who now can gain exposure to one of the newest UNIX operating systems available. In addition to its native language, Objective C, the NeXT platform also supports a variety of other languages, including Pascal, C, C++ Fortran, Common Lisp, and Scheme.
On the following pages, you'll read more about why mathematics and computer sciences faculty are increasingly turning to NeXT-both in the classroom and the research lab.