Mathematica Notebook

Claude skill: mathematica-notebook

A Claude skill for authoring and editing Wolfram Mathematica notebooks (.nb files) from natural-language requests.

Ask Claude for a notebook — "scaffold me a notebook that derives the Euler–Lagrange equations for a simple pendulum" — and it produces a real, unevaluated .nb file structured with Title / Section / Text / Input cells that you can open in the Wolfram frontend and step through with Shift-Enter.

What it does

• Create new .nb files from a structured cell specification — proper Wolfram serialization, no hand-written Notebook[{…}] gymnastics.
• Extract cells from an existing .nb back to a clean JSON form you (or Claude) can transform and write back — so Claude can refactor code inside a notebook without breaking its structure.
• Round-trip safe: plain-string Input/Code cells extract to the same JSON they were written from; complex cells (typeset math, graphics) come through as raw Wolfram expressions and pass through untouched.

Prerequisites

A local Wolfram kernel. The bundled wrapper probes for one automatically:

1. wolframscript (recommended — comes with Wolfram Engine, which is free for developers)
2. wolfram (command-line kernel, Wolfram Desktop / Mathematica installations)
3. math (legacy kernel name)

On macOS, the wrapper also looks in /Applications/Mathematica.app/Contents/MacOS/ and similar app-bundle locations. The standalone Mathematica front-end alone is not enough — you need a command-line kernel.

Installation

This repo is a Claude Code marketplace, so the fastest install is from inside Claude Code itself:

/plugin marketplace add satfra/claude-skill-mathematica-notebooks
/plugin install mathematica-notebook@mathematica-notebook-marketplace

Alternative: drop-in install

If you're not using the marketplace system, clone and copy the subfolder into your skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/<you>/mathematica-notebook-skill.git
cp -r mathematica-notebook-skill/mathematica-notebook/skills/mathematica-notebook ~/.claude/skills/
chmod +x ~/.claude/skills/mathematica-notebook/scripts/run_wolfram.sh

Or grab the .skill bundle from the Releases page and install via your harness's plugin mechanism.

Quick examples

Ask Claude things like:

• "Put together a notebook that derives the equations of motion for a simple pendulum via the Euler–Lagrange formalism, plus the small-angle limit. Save as pendulum.nb."
• "I need a notebook doing slow-roll inflation checks for a φ² and a φ⁴ potential — integrate the background ODEs with NDSolve and extract t_end where ε=1. Call it inflaton.nb."
• "Read gamma_traces.nb, keep the Weyl-representation setup, but rewrite every trace computation to use Signature instead of the explicit Levi-Civita lookup."

How it works

Claude authors a flat list of cell specs as JSON, passes them to the bundled Wolfram script, and the kernel builds a real Notebook[{Cell[…], …}] expression and writes it out with Put. Input/Code/Program cell bodies are wrapped in BoxData[…] so the frontend renders them as formatted code; other styles (Title, Section, Text, …) take plain strings.

mathematica-notebook/skills/mathematica-notebook/
├── SKILL.md              ← instructions Claude reads when the skill triggers
└── scripts/
    ├── run_wolfram.sh    ← bash wrapper: probes for a Wolfram kernel
    └── nb_tool.wls       ← Wolfram Language script: create / extract

Cell spec format

{
  "cells": [
    {"type": "Title",   "content": "Simple Pendulum"},
    {"type": "Section", "content": "Setup"},
    {"type": "Text",    "content": "Generalized coordinate: theta(t)."},
    {"type": "Input",   "content": "L = (1/2) m l^2 theta'[t]^2 - m g l (1 - Cos[theta[t]])"}
  ]
}

Supported cell types (typical hierarchy):

Title · Chapter · Section · Subsection · Subsubsection · Subsubsubsection · Text · Input · Code · Item · ItemNumbered · Program · Message · Caption · PageBreak

Optional "raw": true parses "content" as a Wolfram expression instead of a string — useful for typeset math (TextData, BoxData[FormBox[…]]) and other frontend-structural content.

Command-line usage

The wrapper can also be invoked directly, independently of Claude:

# Create an .nb from a JSON cell list
./scripts/run_wolfram.sh create cells.json out.nb

# Extract cells from an .nb back to JSON
./scripts/run_wolfram.sh extract in.nb cells.json

This makes the skill useful as a plain CLI tool too — e.g., for generating notebooks from other scripts or templating pipelines.

Troubleshooting

• "No Wolfram kernel found on PATH" — Install Wolfram Engine (free) or use a full Wolfram Desktop / Mathematica install and ensure wolframscript, wolfram, or math is on your $PATH. The standalone frontend (Mathematica.app / Mathematica.exe) is not a kernel.
• "file does not parse as a valid Wolfram Notebook expression" — usually the .nb was hand-edited and its expression syntax was damaged. Open it in the Wolfram frontend, save, and re-try.
• Sandboxed environments — if Claude's bash is restricted from running the wrapper, it falls back to writing the Notebook[{…}] expression directly (see SKILL.md "If the wrapper can't be executed"). The user can re-run the wrapper on the saved cells.json once wrapper access is granted.