Many of the figures in the text relating to the Mie theory were constructed from computational data generated using the Mathematica® system for doing mathematics on a computer. Although this is not a necessary choice of software, it was found to be very convenient and efficient. It is a functional-programming-based language that, although it is not as fast as C or Fortran, is quite user friendly and contains very efficient routines for all the special functions in the preceding appendices. Nevertheless, almost all routines used to compute Mie scattering functions ran fairly rapidly on Pentium II and Pentium III processors. All figures were eventually converted to PostScript® for plotting and were labeled in TEX

The Mie partial-wave coefficients are given by Eqs. (3.88) and (3.89) in terms of Ricatti–Bessel functions, and it is the latter that encompass most of the computational effort. Although Mathematica's built-in functions were used frequently, we employ iterated recursion relations here because the former are too slow for large indices and arguments.