As a fan of cars, I find that even when I am perfectly happy with my vehicle, I check car lots and classifieds and car-dealer ads. This began in college when I had to drive a car that, let me just say, was not a high-performance vehicle. It got me from point A to point B most of the time, but it always needed work and I never knew when it would break down and leave me stranded. I always dreamed of driving a really nice automobile.

Working at Wolfram Research, I have many times heard the analogy of Mathematica as a high-performance computational engine. The high-performance phrase takes me back to cars and I wondered, what kind of car would Mathematica be? In my mind, it would clearly be something very fast that has a great engine under the hood but is easy to drive. A car I would’ve liked to have had in college. Then I thought about how many students have access to Mathematica, which is much like a college student driving a brand-new sports car. It has more than enough power for most applications, and using it can make you look good.
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Stephen Wolfram recently received an award for his contributions to computer science. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the speech he gave on that occasion. (The audio version of the original speech is here.)

I want to talk about a big topic here today: the quest for computable knowledge. It’s a topic that spans a lot of history, and that I’ve personally spent a long time working on. I want to talk about the history. I want to talk about my own efforts in this direction. And I want to talk about what I think the future holds.
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While tidying up after my kids once again, I found myself staring at the toy shown below and thinking of a conversation that I had had with an archaeologist Mathematica user a few days before. He had been interested in image processing of aerial photographs, but it occurred to me that image processing would also allow reconstruction of the musical secrets of this precious artifact that I had just uncovered in the remains of a lost toy civilization.

Well, this should be fun for 5–10 minutes. The toy is a music box, where you crank the handle to turn the drum that has pins on it to pluck the prongs to the left. Can I discover the tune, without having to move the parts?

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During the last weekend of May, I was one of the representatives for Wolfram Research at Maker Faire at the San Mateo County Expo Center in San Mateo, California. Maker Faire is the largest do-it-yourself (DIY) festival, organized annually by Make Magazine. Participants come from a wide variety of groups involved in projects related to arts, crafts, music, sculpting, robotics, engineering, and so on. The participants are aptly named makers, and their creations are showcased in this two-day family-friendly event. While I don’t have the exact figures, the number of people at this faire was around 78,000.

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The Mathematica mailing list and internet newsgroup comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica (called MathGroup for short) have been in existence for more than twenty years now. In January 2005, we passed the 50,000-message mark. Now, in only a little more than four years, we have added another 50,000.

I want to take this opportunity to talk about the history of this effort—how it was started and what is involved in its operation. While it may sound like trials and tribulations, it is actually fun, and I have learned a lot about Mathematica and its uses and users, and about servers, the internet, and general social interactions over the years.
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I just visited Washington, DC, and I find myself returning with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. Did this have something to do with the progression from mild rain to what could be the first sunny, summer days of the year? Or seeing the nation’s capitol in person?

Partially, yes. But the larger factor was attending the 2009 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Conference, and, you guessed it, talking about Mathematica and mathematics education for several days!

I’ve attended five NCTM conferences over my ten years with Wolfram Research, and I always find the teachers’ enthusiasm contagious. They constantly look for new ways to inspire their students, while at the same time building a strong foundation in mathematics. Teachers usually have clever ways to share information and spend countless hours trying new ideas and new presentation styles.
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Have you ever wanted a set of straightforward, step-by-step instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a specific task with Mathematica? Have you ever thought that a Mathematica “quick-reference guide” would be useful? If so, take a look at the “How To” Topics in Version 7. “How tos” are a new type of documentation in Mathematica 7 that provide just the information you need without a lot of detailed background information.

This task-oriented approach makes these “How tos” ideal for those getting started with Mathematica. Some students, educators, researchers, and others that would benefit from using Mathematica feel that it would take too long to learn, or is just too complex to use. While this sentiment might seem reasonable given the computational power and breadth of features available in Mathematica, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
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May 14, 2009 marks the 7^th anniversary of the publication of A New Kind of Science, and it has been my tradition on these anniversaries to write a short report on the progress of NKS.

It has been fascinating over the past few years to watch the progressive absorption of NKS methods and the NKS paradigm into countless different fields. Sometimes there’s visible mention of NKS, though often there is not.

There has been an inexorable growth in the use of the types of models pioneered in NKS. There has been steadily increasing use of the kinds of computational experiments and investigations introduced in NKS. And the NKS way of thinking about computation and in terms of computation has become steadily more widespread.
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With all the new aspects of Mathematica in Versions 6 and 7, I’ve enjoyed visiting universities to talk about how to use Mathematica in even more courses and research projects. Universities enjoy this, too!

I am not, however, very good at thinking about the locations of universities or schools in terms of geography. Planning a trip was a seemingly endless task of cross-referencing maps and lists and notes and more lists—I’m sure you see a pattern forming here.

The solution, as is often the case with me, was to use Mathematica. After finding a list of 7,000+ universities and colleges in the United States, I wrote a Mathematica program to create a list of all such schools near a particular city, complete with rough mileage and a map to use for my work.
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During my stay in Champaign, Illinois at Wolfram Research headquarters last summer, I attended the 2008 Advanced Mathematica Summer School. The Summer School gives people from all over the world a chance to present their challenging problems in varied math and science fields and work with others to find solutions using Mathematica. These research topics cover a very wide range of application areas. My personal interest is in numerics, and I had the chance to work on several related projects.

While at the Summer School, one of the projects I was involved in was to analytically derive a mechanism to compute the stress distribution in a circular plate with concentrated radial loadings.

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