"A Crash Course in Mathematica" is a compact introduction to the program Mathematica, which is widely used in mathematics, as well as in the natural and engineering sciences.

More than ten years ago, I wanted to carry out coordinate transformations for Hamiltonian systems, in order to discuss the stability of certain equilibrium posi tions. Basically, the calculations only involved rational expressions, but they turned out to be extremely complicated, because the third and fourth order terms had to be included. After several months of filling whole blocks of paper with for mulas, I was close to resignation. But, by a lucky incident, I met a colleague who showed me the computer algebra package Reduce. It still required a lot of patience and tricks, but Reduce...