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Date Archive: 2008 June

Announcements & Events

Launching the Mathematica Scrapbook

(Two posts from me in short succession. Forgive me. I promise that I won’t frequent this forum more than is bearable—hopefully. But I’ve been asked to do a post about the Mathematica scrapbook that we’ve just made public, so here I am again.) As I said in my last post, June is a special time around Wolfram Research. Given the fact that June 23rd was the 20th anniversary of Mathematica, there’s been more celebration this June than usual. We started talking about the significance of Mathematica’s 20th birthday and what we should do in commemoration some time ago. We decided that one thing we would like do would be to create an online scrapbook.
Jean Buck, Director of Content Development, Wolfram|Alpha
Announcements & Events

Mathematica Turns 20 Today

Today is an important anniversary for me and our company. Twenty years ago today—at noon (Pacific Time) on Thursday, June 23, 1988—Mathematica 1.0 was officially launched. Much has changed in the world since then, particularly when it comes to computer technology. But I’m happy to be able to say that Mathematica still seems as modern […]

Stephen Wolfram
Announcements & Events

The Mathematica Memory Museum

June is a special time around Wolfram Research. Every year we have a big company picnic to celebrate the anniversary of the release of Mathematica, which occurred June 23, 1988. That’s right, Mathematica turns 20 years old this month.

When you think about it, having a 20th birthday is pretty remarkable for a piece of software. How many other software products do you use now that were around in 1988? More importantly, how many of them are still at the top of their game after so long? We’re pretty proud of the fact that Mathematica’s core design and functionality have stood the test of time.

We thought it would be appropriate to celebrate this anniversary by having a “memory museum” at this year's picnic. Being the de facto company archivist (having once been the corporate librarian and having reached the “relic” status in both raw age and tenure at the company), I took on the role of organizing our displays.

We had a big collage of photos of employees past and present. An awful lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into the creation of Mathematica over the years and it only seemed right to highlight the people behind the product. Anyway, it’s always fun to note the passage of time through funny hairdos, expanding waistlines and receding hairlines.

We wanted to show how Mathematica has changed over time, too. We came up with a few displays that seemed to show this fairly well. Here’s a graphic we used as a poster to show the disk space used by each of our major versions.

Jean Buck, Director of Content Development, Wolfram|Alpha
Computation & Analysis

Flag Day

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress resolved that the flag of the United States would have 13 alternating red and white stripes, with the states represented as white stars on a blue field. The CountryData data paclet has information about this and many other flags, as can be seen in the “Country Flags and Descriptions” Demonstration. If you’d like to test your knowledge of national flags, there is also a “Country Flag Quiz” Demonstration that you may download for free. Both of these Wolfram Demonstrations show off the power of the CountryData paclet. For example, Mathematica can analyze all those flag descriptions.
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Education & Academic

Interacting with NASA Landers from Your Own PC

As an astronomy enthusiast, I try to keep up on all the various goings-on in astronomy news. Astronomy, being a primarily visual science, often lends itself quite well to computer visualization. Recently, NASA landed on Mars again, this time near one of the Martian poles in an attempt to study the ice and landscape of this frigid region. Is there water ice there, or just dry ice made of frozen carbon dioxide? How much of each? That's what the Phoenix Mars Lander was sent to try to unravel.

Solar Power Grid Unfurled—image courtesy of NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona

As an editor for the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, I often get quite interested in new astronomy-related Demonstrations. One particular set, written by Sándor Kabai, focuses on the mechanics of not only the Phoenix Mars Lander, but probes from the past as well.

Landers, as opposed to other spacecraft, must overcome unique design challenges. Unlike orbiters, which typically have only sensors and cameras, landers usually have mechanical components to directly manipulate the surrounding environment like an astronaut could. These components come in many forms, such as wheels, scoops, drilling instruments and so on, which make landers much more interesting to visualize interactively. Although these are not strictly astronomy, more engineering, few would argue that they are space-related and therefore pretty cool!
Jeff Bryant, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Products

Secret Codes in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project (But No Dinosaurs)

Recent Demonstrations: Visual Encryption

When I was a kid, dinosaurs and secret codes were topics of surefire interest, since one was useful for eating your little sister and the other one for denying her the password to the clubhouse. I haven't noticed any Demonstrations about dinosaurs yet (I continue to keep an eye out), but interesting ones about cryptography turn up regularly, including a couple of neat recent entries on visual encryption: Michael Schrieber's Visual Encryption Pad and Paul van der Schaaf's Graphical Modulo-4 Image Encryption.

One cipher (if you can call it that) common in my kiddie code books involved printing a message in red stipple overlaid with a noise field of blue stipple. You could use the piece of red cellophane included in the back of the book to mask out the blue part and reveal the secret message. The Visual Encryption Pad Demonstration is the sophisticated cousin of this scheme, involving the overlay of a random bit mask (the key) with another bit mask of the same size (the message). Applying a set of rules to the combination of bits at a given pixel (in the case of this Demonstration, XNOR) reveals the message, which might look like this:

If your spies in the field don't have computers, and you are limited to passing around messages on microfilm or something, then the only bit-combination rule set you will be able to use is OR. And of course your messages are limited to one bit per pixel. The Graphical Modulo-4 Image Encryption> scheme, on the other hand, can encode more than one bit per pixel, even on physical media. Let me quote some snippets of the Demonstration's code and describe how they work, and then I'll discuss a couple of extensions that suggest themselves.
Dillon Tracy, Senior Kernel Developer, Core Mathematica Engineering