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News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2007 October

Computation & Analysis

A Thousand Points of Light

The spinthariscope, invented and beautifully named by William Crookes in 1903, is a device for seeing individual atoms. Or at least, seeing the death of individual atoms. A spinthariscope consists of a needle, similar to a watch hand, positioned in front of a zinc sulfide luminous screen, with a magnifying glass focused on the screen. At the end of the needle is a small patch of radioactive material. Originally radium was used; more recently polonium, uranium and americium have been found to be safer.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press
Announcements & Events

The Prize Is Won; The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved

“And although it will no doubt be very difficult to prove, it seems likely that this Turing machine will in the end turn out to be universal.” So I wrote on page 709 of A New Kind of Science (NKS). I had searched the computational universe for the simplest possible universal Turing machine. And I […]

Stephen Wolfram
Products

The Day That Documents and Applications Merged

My announcement last Thursday that you can publish almost any Mathematica notebook so it’s interactive in our free Wolfram Player brings about much more of a change than you might first think. In my Technology Conference talk, I explained how this new Publish for Wolfram Player service removes one of the last hurdles to making new applications as everyday as new documents. And in turn that initiates a new era of communicating technical ideas.
Conrad Wolfram