Setting up the system

To access the Preferences dialog, you need to select Edit | Preferences… in the application menu.

Note

On Mac OS X, the Preferences menu is located in the Mathematica application menu.

Let's review the most interesting settings of the system, which will be useful for our further work:

In the Appearance | Number | Formatting tab, you can select various numeric formatting options. Will there be a space separator between the digit blocks? What should be the decimal point character? How many digits will be displayed by default in the output?

In the next Multiplication tab, you can select the appearance of the multiplication:

Note

In Mathematica, the space between two expressions means multiplying those expressions.

In this tab, you can choose whether the multiplication symbol between the multiplied numbers appears automatically, as well as choose the symbol type: space, center dot, *, or x.