Mathcad is a Windows program designed to work with formulae text and graphics. Earlier releases have been described in detail by the reviewer (Mathcad 6 - Maths&Stats Nov 96) and by Duncan Robertson (Mathcad 7 – Maths&Stats Aug 98 and Mathcad 8 – Maths&Stats Aug 99). In this review the main features of Mathcad are therefore only briefly discussed before the changes and enhancements between Mathcad 8 and Mathcad 2001 are described. Currently Mathcad 2001 is available in two forms – Mathcad 2001 Professional (education price £199 – upgrade from any non-student edition £115) and Mathcad 2001 Premium (education price £399 – upgrade from any non-student edition £199). The difference between the professional edition and the premium edition is that included with the premium edition are several additional programs such as Axum 6 Smartsketch 3.1 and the Mathcad Solving & Optimisation Pack. The latest student edition is Mathcad 8. Student editions contain restrictions on arrays to a maximum of 1000 elements and do not have all the programming capabilities.
