In Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, noted mathematicians Elwyn Berlekamp, John Conway, and Richard Guy have this dedication: “To Martin Gardner, who has brought more mathematics to more millions than anyone else.”

Martin Gardner passed away on May 22, 2010, and I talk about my own introduction to his work at the Wolfram|Alpha Blog. On May 21, I was asked for the best book about math for a young adult. I suggested Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games (CD-ROM), which contains his 15-book canon. In my opinion, it’s still the best book series for sparking an interest in mathematics.

In a way, Wolfram Research has been trying to beat Martin in the noble goal of bringing math and science to the millions. We’ve partnered with CBS/Paramount for the NUMB3RS TV show, our CEO Stephen Wolfram wrote A New Kind of Science, co-founder Theodore Gray made what I think is the best periodic table in the world, and we built MathWorld, the most comprehensive math encyclopedia on the web. More »

Wolfram Research hosts lots of popular websites, including Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, and we collect a lot of web traffic data on those sites to make sure you, our visitors, are meeting your goals. To really dive deep into that data, our corporate analysis team has built on a number of Mathematica’s standard data analysis features to develop a powerful, in-house computable data function for studying web traffic and other business data.

In this video, corporate analysis team lead David Howell describes how using Mathematica gives his team huge advantages in discovering new patterns and relationships within our web traffic data and in delivering insightful interactive reports.

When we released Version 6 in May 2007, Mathematica was reinvented. We also reinvented something else that Mathematica has long been known for: its extensive and detailed product documentation.

While some of you appreciated the recrafting of our tutorial content as stand-alone electronic documents, others missed the narrative of the book, and you let us know it. Which is a good thing, because it led to the creation of the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial Collection.

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As the closing days of the United Kingdom election campaign have focused on the economy, I thought I would repeat the analysis that Theodore Gray did on Dow Jones returns under United States presidential parties—but using UK data.

I started by going to an interactive Mathematica Demonstration that Theodore wrote. Like all Demonstrations, it doesn’t just present information, it encodes the analysis, so by downloading the source code, I was able to re-deploy it on UK data quite quickly. The data was a little more difficult (detailed at the end of this post).

So what did I find?
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