Mathematica Experts Live: Visualization Q&A 2012
May 16, 2012 — Wolfram Blog Team
For the first time, we’re holding a virtual event in a new talk-show format. We’ll put Mathematica experts live on camera to answer your questions about visualization.
Our host will accept questions in real time and pass them to three of our graphics experts. You can also submit your question when you register for the event.
We will be prepared to address questions on graphics and visualizations, similar to these:
- How can I add a drop shadow to my plot?
- How can I independently color different sides of a surface?
- How can I turn several locators on and off on a graphic with a mouse click?
- How can I make an x-y scatter plot with auxiliary histograms placed next to the x-y axes?
- How can I create an intertwined graphic like the one below?
The virtual event will be held Tuesday, May 22, from 11am to noon Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).
Announcing Wolfram Finance Platform
May 15, 2012 — Jon McLoone, International Business & Strategic Development
One key project for me recently has been the new Wolfram Finance Platform, which I am pleased to announce today.
This is a major new initiative for us to create the ultimate computation environment for finance. It builds on our existing computational technology with extra capabilities and professional support services.
As part of this, I spent some time interviewing finance customers in the city of London about what they liked and didn’t like about Mathematica, what they wanted, and why some of their colleagues didn’t use it.
Looking to the Future of A New Kind of Science
May 14, 2012 — Stephen Wolfram
(This is the third in a series of posts about A New Kind of Science. Previous posts have covered the original reaction to the book and what’s happened since it was published.)
Today ten years have passed since A New Kind of Science (“the NKS book”) was published. But in many ways the development that started with the book is still only just beginning. And over the next several decades I think its effects will inexorably become ever more obvious and important.
Indeed, even at an everyday level I expect that in time there will be all sorts of visible reminders of NKS all around us. Today we are continually exposed to technology and engineering that is directly descended from the development of the mathematical approach to science that began in earnest three centuries ago. Sometime hence I believe a large portion of our technology will instead come from NKS ideas. It will not be created incrementally from components whose behavior we can analyze with traditional mathematics and related methods. Rather it will in effect be “mined” by searching the abstract computational universe of possible simple programs.
And even at a visual level this will have obvious consequences. For today’s technological systems tend to be full of simple geometrical shapes (like beams and boxes) and simple patterns of behavior that we can readily understand and analyze. But when our technology comes from NKS and from mining the computational universe there will not be such obvious simplicity. Instead, even though the underlying rules will often be quite simple, the overall behavior that we see will often be in a sense irreducibly complex.
So as one small indication of what is to come—and as part of celebrating the first decade of A New Kind of Science—starting today, when Wolfram|Alpha is computing, it will no longer display a simple rotating geometric shape, but will instead run a simple program (currently, a 2D cellular automaton) from the computational universe found by searching for a system with the right kind of visually engaging behavior.
One Year of Daily Tips from @MathematicaTip
May 7, 2012 — Wolfram Blog Team
It’s been one year since we launched our Twitter feed for bite-sized Mathematica hints and tips!
Thousands of people follow @MathematicaTip to get a new tip every day, Monday through Friday, covering everything from keyboard shortcuts:
Instead of using % to refer to the most recent output, try Ctrl+Shift+L (Mac: Cmd+Shift+L) to directly insert the output from above.
— MathematicaTip (@MathematicaTip) October 10, 2011
From the Wolfram Science Summer School to Wolfram|Alpha Pro
May 1, 2012 — Carlo Barbieri, Applied Research Group
In spring 2011, while adding the finishing touches to my PhD dissertation, I decided to enroll in the Wolfram Science Summer School (then called the NKS Summer School). I never suspected that my project at the Summer School would lead to a job and my involvement in one of the central features of Wolfram|Alpha Pro.
During my years as a graduate student I had the chance to live in three different countries and experience different working environments: other than my native Italy, I lived in Paris, where my PhD was based at ENS, and in Princeton, where I was lucky enough to spend time at the Institute for Advanced Study. However, at the end of my PhD, I felt that most of my interest in what I was doing was gone and that I needed to try something new.
Once at the Summer School, I had the chance to meet and chat with Stephen Wolfram as he helped me come up with a problem to work on. One of the first things I told him was that I was weary of open-ended academic kinds of problems and I was afraid no one was ever going to read my papers. I said that I wanted to deal with intellectual challenges, but I also wanted to tackle something that had a clear beginning and end.
His reply came as a disappointment, since what he suggested I work on was both completely outside my area of expertise and clearly one of those impossibly wide problems that I was now skeptical of. What did he say?
Add a Wolfram Demonstration to Your Site in One Easy Step
April 24, 2012 — Vitaliy Kaurov, Technical Communication & Strategy
With nearly 8,000 interactive knowledge apps available on a huge variety of topics in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, you’re bound to find one—or more—that you want to share.
Now you can easily embed any Demonstration you like on your own blog or website in one step. Watch this short video or read on to see how (we recommend viewing the video in full-screen mode):
How to Make Interactive Apps with CDF
April 18, 2012 — Vitaliy Kaurov, Technical Communication & Strategy
A number of you have written us asking about interface design, Dynamic structures, and general starting tips for creating Wolfram Computable Document Format (CDF) files. I will present three examples of CDF files that will provide some insight into good practices. You should also read the recent Mathematica Q&A Series blog post about delivering CDF to your websites and blogs with the help of the CDF Web Deployment Wizard. This enables users to showcase their Mathematica projects online and share them with the global community. Let’s have a look at some features that make CDF great, rising well above other platforms. For a more extensive list, please see the CDF comparison table.
We will start with a short program that numerically solves the challenging problem of constrained global optimization by finding the minimum on a limited surface region. Think of finding the lowest point of an area of a mountain range. Dragging the 2D slider on the interface below automatically changes the surface geometry, and the CDF engine quickly recomputes the new minimum. This is reflected in the updated positions of the red dot. Drag and rotate the 3D graphics with the mouse to get a different view. Hold Ctrl while dragging to zoom (Command on a Mac) or hold Shift and drag to pan.
Explore the Computable Document Format: Free Virtual Workshop
April 9, 2012 — Wolfram Blog Team
Ever since we launched the Computable Document Format (CDF) last summer, people have been excited about the ease of deploying interactive documents to their clients and on their websites, and we’re seeing CDFs used to enhance blogs, textbooks, and other applications in many different areas.
Now we’re holding a virtual workshop where you can hear from the author of an award-winning CDF textbook, chat with Wolfram experts in publishing and application development, and learn how to get started with your own projects.
The Wolfram CDF Virtual Workshop will feature a keynote by Conrad Wolfram plus talks and Q&A sessions with Wolfram experts.
The virtual event will be held Tuesday, April 24, at the following times:
* 8am–noon Eastern Daylight Time (EDT); 1pm–5pm British Summer Time (BST)
* Repeat session: 1pm–5pm EDT; 6pm–10pm BST
Virtual seats are limited—see the event schedule and register today!
Analyzing Your Email with Mathematica
April 5, 2012 — Paul-Jean Letourneau, Lead Developer, Wolfram|Alpha
In Stephen Wolfram’s recent blog post about personal analytics, he showed a number of plots generated by analyzing his archive of personal data. One of the most common pieces of feedback we received was that people wanted to know how they could perform the same kind of analysis on their own data. So in this blog post I’m going to show you how to analyze your email the same way Stephen Wolfram did.
Naturally, we did all the data cleaning and analysis for Stephen’s data in Mathematica, so we’ll be using Mathematica for everything here as well. All the code can be downloaded here.
Let’s start with that really cool diurnal plot Stephen did of his outgoing email. This plot shows the date and time each email was sent, with years running along the x axis and times of day on the y axis:
Making of the “Facts of the Moment” Plaque for the David Cameron Visit
March 28, 2012 — Jon McLoone, International Business & Strategic Development
Several people have asked me to write about the virtual plaque that we made for the official opening of the Wolfram Research Europe office by UK Prime Minister David Cameron.
The concept that came out of the short brainstorming meeting was to have a button on an iPad that would trigger a video on our display board, leading to an image showing facts about the world at the moment of revelation.
This is the story of how we made it happen.
