Tips for analyzing your social networks with Mathematica, workshops for publishing with CDF, real-world solutions for your financial applications—these are just a few of the many highlights from the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011.

If you missed a talk or weren’t able to attend, we’ve now made videos of select presentations available on the Presentations and Talks section of the conference website. More »

Teachers, are you looking for a new way to integrate technology into your classroom? How about through a dynamic textbook or pre-generated lesson plans? Students, are you looking for some extra help or practice in your classes? How about using interactive demonstrations and widgets to help understand the concepts you are learning? The Wolfram Education Portal is the answer for students and teachers alike!

We are happy to announce the launch of the free Beta version of the Wolfram Education Portal. The portal comes equipped with a dynamic and interactive textbook, lesson plans aligned to the common core standards, and many other supplemental materials for your courses, including Wolfram Demonstrations, widgets, and videos. The Education Portal currently contains full materials for Algebra and partial materials for Calculus, but will continue to grow and improve with your comments and feedback. More »

UPDATE: The solution to the puzzle and more comments from Jon have been added at the bottom of the post.

On the long flight to the recent Wolfram Technology Conference, I ended up on the puzzle page of a newspaper. My attention was drawn to a word ladder puzzle, where you must fill in a sequence of words from clues, but each word differs from the previous by only a single letter. Here, for example, is a simple puzzle already solved:

I wasn’t going to do a blog entry on this, as it is a very similar task to my “Exploring Synonym Chains” post that I wrote some time ago, but that changed with a chance conversation at the (excellent) Technology Conference. Proving that one never stops learning, Charles Pooh, one of our graph theory developers, pointed out to me that my synonyms item could have been done much better. I had broken one of the very rules that I wrote about in my “10 Tips for Fast Mathematica Code” entry—”Use built-in functions.” I had effectively re-implemented the built-in Mathematica commands GraphPeriphery and GraphDiameter.

So, armed with these two new functions, let’s find the longest word ladder puzzle that can be made using Mathematica’s English dictionary. More »

Does this scenario sound familiar? You’ve created a real-time analytics interface for your internal data in Mathematica and you want to share it with your colleagues. But they don’t have, or typically need, Mathematica.

You aren’t alone. Many of our users have approached me with similar concerns. That’s why we created Wolfram Player Pro—the professional platform for running interactive applications based on Wolfram technology.

Player Pro is a high-level deployment engine for application developers. We’ve just released a new version that supports almost all the functionality of Mathematica 8, giving you everything you need to deploy your applications to your colleagues or clients. And with this version, you can not only deploy reports, applets, and other material as full-featured desktop applications or documents, but also as interactive web tools using the new browser plugin. More »

In a recent series of Image Processing with Mathematica workshops held at universities across the United States, we presented Mathematica’s new image processing functionality and applied it on the spot to attendees’ real-world problems. It was amazing to me to see how rapidly and flexibly Mathematica could be applied to solve complex image processing problems. For example, it might seem like writing a program to automatically count cells in an image would be a master’s research project, but amazingly you can do it with a few lines of Mathematica code.

Below I am using morphological operations and measurement tools to segment and analyze red blood cells in a microscopy image.

Cell segmentation and hole filling can be done with an intensity thresholding using Binarize and FillingTransform:

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Take Stephen Wolfram’s theory of the universe, add a dash of symmetry, and what do you get? Snowflakes.

Cellular automata—the basis of Stephen’s theory—typically operate on rectlinear grids. But with suitable automata rules and a simple geometric transformation, you can achieve patterns with six-fold dihedral symmetry, the symmetry of snowflakes.

My colleague Ed Pegg Jr. showed that idea nicely in his Demonstration “Snowflake-Like Patterns”. I started with his Demonstration; added some ideas from Matthew Szudzik’s related Demonstration, “Snowflake Growth”; and fine-tuned the rendering to recall Bentley’s classic snowflake photos, arriving at this interactive snowflake generator. More »

Mathematica 8 introduced powerful new advances in technical computing. Among them: free-form input and Wolfram|Alpha integration; fully integrated, specialist technical functionality in a number of application areas; tools to develop faster and more powerful applications; and the Computable Document Format (CDF).

At the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011, the Wolfram directors who led the development of these new capabilities presented a Mathematica 8 Year in Review:

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Got questions about Mathematica? The Wolfram Blog has answers! We’ll regularly answer selected questions from users around the web. You can submit your question directly to the Q&A Team.

This week’s question comes from Jee:

How can I transform the output of partial differentiation such as f^{(1, 0)}[x, y] to the mathematical form ?

Read below or watch this screencast for the answer (we recommend viewing it in full-screen mode):

We will assume that the reader is already familiar with the basics of differentiation in Mathematica. To quickly catch up with the topic, one should read the recent Q&A blog post “Three Functions for Computing Derivatives”. More »

Touch Press, the digital publishing company founded by Stephen Wolfram, Theodore Gray, and Max Whitby, continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the world of ebooks. A big part of the company’s success is due to its use of Mathematica.

Touch Press developers have used Mathematica in the production of nearly all of its highly popular titles, including The Elements, Solar System, and its latest title, March of the Dinosaurs.

At the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011, Gray gave an inside look at the Mathematica tools used in the company’s current and future ebooks and described why Mathematica makes Touch Press perfectly positioned to redefine the future of publishing. More »

When people tell me that Mathematica isn’t fast enough, I usually ask to see the offending code and often find that the problem isn’t a lack in Mathematica’s performance, but sub-optimal use of Mathematica. I thought I would share the list of things that I look for first when trying to optimize Mathematica code.

1. Use floating-point numbers if you can, and use them early.

Of the most common issues that I see when I review slow code is that the programmer has inadvertently asked Mathematica to do things more carefully than needed. Unnecessary use of exact arithmetic is the most common case.

In most numerical software, there is no such thing as exact arithmetic. 1/3 is the same thing as 0.33333333333333. That difference can be pretty important when you hit nasty, numerically unstable problems, but in the majority of tasks, floating-point numbers are good enough and, importantly, much faster. In Mathematica any number with a decimal point and less than 16 digits of input is automatically treated as a machine float, so always use the decimal point if you want speed ahead of accuracy (e.g. enter a third as 1./3.). Here is a simple example where working with floating-point numbers is nearly 50.6 times faster than doing the computation exactly and then converting the result to a decimal afterward. And in this case it gets the same result.

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