Wolfram Blog Team
Mathematica’s Role in Flight Operational Safety Analysis
September 29, 2009
Wolfram Blog Team

Major growth in air traffic is forcing regulators and traffic management teams within the industry to create and study more efficient flight operations. Mike Ulrey, a member of Boeing’s Advanced Air Traffic Management team, is tackling this problem with Mathematica.

In this video, Ulrey describes how Mathematica’s graphical and visualization capabilities play a crucial role in developing models to analyze and test the safety of new flight operations. “It puts the whole conversation of whether it’s safe on a firm quantitative-model basis that enables people to make decisions about whether to go forward,” says Ulrey. “They have much better insight and they have confidence in the results.”
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Wolfram Blog Team
Stephen Wolfram’s Q&A Webcast Now Available Online
September 23, 2009
Wolfram Blog Team

Stephen Wolfram shared his thoughts and answered many of your questions about Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and his scientific research in his webcast Thursday, September 17.

In case you missed it, the webcast is now available on our new streaming server.

Thanks for participating and submitting great questions.

Brenton Bostick
Interactive Pythagoras Trees with webMathematica 3
September 22, 2009
Brenton Bostick, Kernel Technology

I wanted to build a simple web application for manipulating and exporting Pythagoras trees to make posters and desktop wallpaper, and so I turned to the new features of webMathematica 3.

webMathematica is a web application framework released by Wolfram Research. It allows users to write web pages using Mathematica, seamlessly integrating Mathematica code with HTML and JavaScript.

webMathematica 3, the new version released on September 15, introduces several new features such as a web version of the popular Manipulate command and a way to evaluate Mathematica code asynchronously, without delaying page loading.
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Wolfram Blog Team
Live Webcast with Stephen Wolfram
September 16, 2009
Wolfram Blog Team

Have you ever wanted to pick the brain of the man behind Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, and A New Kind of Science? Stephen Wolfram will be sharing his thoughts and answering your questions in a live webcast on Thursday, September 17, at 2pm U.S. CDT. To submit your questions for Stephen Wolfram, please visit the Wolfram|Alpha blog. We hope you’ll join us at justin.tv for this event.

Wolfram Blog Team
webMathematica 3 Is Now Available
September 15, 2009
Wolfram Blog Team

We are pleased to announce the release of webMathematica 3 today.

Innovative new performance and development features make webMathematica 3 the ultimate tool for adding dynamic content to the web. The new version makes it faster and easier to build websites that allow users to compute and visualize results directly from a web browser.

webMathematica 3 is the deployment technology that makes Wolfram|Alpha, the groundbreaking online computational knowledge engine, possible. Wolfram|Alpha visitors can tap into Mathematica’s computational and graphics abilities without having Mathematica experience or Mathematica itself.
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Chris Carlson
Twisted Architecture
September 11, 2009
Chris Carlson, User Interface Group

I didn’t set out to tie knots in Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower or wrinkle his Gherkin, but I got carried away. It’s one of the occupational hazards of working with Mathematica.

It started with an innocent experiment in lofting, a technique also known as “skinning” that originated in boat-building. I wanted to explore some three-dimensional forms, and a basic lofting function seemed like a quick ticket to results. I dashed off the function Loft, which takes a stack of three-dimensional contours and covers it with a skin of polygons.

The results of the Loft function
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Ed Pegg Jr
9–9–9
September 9, 2009
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Group

Number 9, number 9, number 9.

The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” has the above loop, and their version of Rock Band is being released today. The movie 9 comes out today, too.

When a number has a lot of nines in it, like .99999999999999999, many computer systems can run into rounding problems. Fortunately, Mathematica can handle both exact and numeric forms. Here are exact forms of various
numbers whose numeric forms have lots of nines.
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Doug McClintic
Wolfram Research at SIGGRAPH 2009
September 8, 2009
Doug McClintic, Commercial Account Executive

Are you a die-hard video gamer? Can you spend hours at a time sacrificing sleep to play your favorite real-time action console game? Or maybe you find yourself captivated by the amazing animation found in movies such as Pixar’s latest release, Up. Whatever your form of diversion, have you ever stopped to wonder what makes 3D games so realistic or how Pixar managed to animate thousands of balloons lifting Carl’s house? We at Wolfram Research have the inside scoop—it’s all about the math and physics.
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Theodore Gray
A New Slant in Mathematica
September 3, 2009
Theodore Gray, Co-founder, Director of User Interfaces

Longtime Mathematica user Flip Phillips recently sent us this tremendously amusing error message generated by Mathematica. Much as you might think when stumbling upon a pickup truck hanging from a tree, your first reaction is probably, “How does something like that even happen??”

Diagonal error message sent in by Flip Phillps—click to enlarge

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