SMP (computer algebra system)

This article is about a specific software package. For symbolic computation in general, see Computer Algebra System.

Symbolic Manipulation Program, usually called SMP, was a computer algebra system designed by Chris A. Cole and Stephen Wolfram at Caltech circa 1979 and initially developed in the Caltech physics department under Wolfram's leadership with contributions from Geoffrey C. Fox, Jeffrey M. Greif, Eric D. Mjolsness, Larry J. Romans, Timothy Shaw, and Anthony E. Terrano. It was first sold commercially in 1981 by the Computer Mathematics Corporation of Los Angeles which later became part of Inference Corporation; Inference Corp. further developed the program and marketed it commercially from 1983 to 1988. SMP was essentially Version Zero of the more ambitious Mathematica system.

SMP was influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied).

References

• Chris A. Cole, Stephen Wolfram, "SMP: A Symbolic Manipulation Program", Proceedings of the fourth ACM symposium on Symbolic and algebraic computation (SIGSAM), Snowbird, Utah, 1981. full text
• Stephen Wolfram with Chris A. Cole, SMP: A Symbolic Manipulation Program, Reference Manual, California Institute of Technology, 1981; Inference Corporation, 1983. full text
• Stephen Wolfram, "Symbolic Mathematical Computation", Communications of the ACM, April 1985 (Volume 28, Issue 4). Despite the general-sounding title the focus is on an introduction to SMP. Online version of this article
• J.M. Greif, "The SMP Pattern-Matcher" in B.F. Caviness (editor), Proceedings of EUROCAL 1985, volume 2, pgs. 303-314, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, no. 204, ISBN 3-540-15984-3 A discussion, with examples, of the capabilities, tasks, and design philosophy of the pattern-matcher.
• SMP's manual "SMP Handbook"
• Stephen Wolfram's blog post on the history of SMP's creation