With Halloween approaching, I thought that I would plumb new depths in frivolous uses of Mathematica by making some scary pumpkin movies. Woooo!
If your nerves can take the sheer horror of it all, turn the lights down and dare to read on…
Practically everything I know about British art history would fit in one BBC documentary—the very BBC documentary I watched a little while ago.
I was intrigued to learn about the The Ambassadors, a sixteenth-century painting by Holbein. Among other things, this painting is famous for containing a human skull hidden in plain sight. Can you see it?
Wolfram Research is saddened to announce the passing of Jerry Uhl, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Illinois. Jerry’s scholarly contributions to the field of mathematics are numerous, but we will remember him best for his passion for education and mathematics reform, which led him to the development of the Calculus&Mathematica program that is still used today by progressive math programs.
For his support of Mathematica and his innovation in math education, Wolfram Research presented Jerry with the first Mathematica Pioneer Award in 2008. The following video was made for the presentation of that award.
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Twenty-five years ago, the Mandelbrot set was published on the cover of Scientific American, in connection with an A. K. Dewdney Computer Recreations column. A few days ago, the original Mandelbrot set column was re-released.
The Mandelbrot set became a rite of passage for anyone programming mathematical images. For me, I was making images on a Mac Plus, and sent some of them out in a zine I was running at the time. As a result, Piers Anthony asked me to help get fractal images and facts for his Mode series. In the course of this, Piers and I asked for and received permission to use the Mandelbrot set from Benoît himself. “You probably don’t need my permission, but I’m happy to grant it to you.”
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As a society, we seem to love data. We slice it, dice it, aggregate it, and analyze it. It tells us about the people, places, and things around us and around the world. It informs public policies and the public.
It’s easy to take for granted official statistics collected and presented by government agencies or statistics collected by non-governmental curators, because data seems to be everywhere, but it’s important to remember that it takes a huge amount of work to collect that data and provide it in a usable form. World Statistics Day is a good time to remember that hard work and the impact information from the collected data has on our daily life.
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The final day of this year’s Wolfram Technology Conference was bittersweet. The presentations were outstanding again, but now it’s all over. If there is a silver lining, it’s that we can’t wait to see what everyone will come up with next year!
Another great day at the Wolfram Technology Conference 2010! Wolfram Co-founder Theodore Gray kicked off the morning with his presentation on ebook publishing. Using his own ebook The Elements, he demonstrated how he used Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha to create a publication that is uniquely interactive and has been a runaway success with consumers, ranking #1 in the Apple Store. According to Theo, his company Touch Press is working on several more ebooks already.
Back on May 27, we wrote a remembrance of Martin Gardner. He would have been 96 on October 21, which has prompted the worldwide event, Celebration of Mind.
If you look at the event map, you’ll see the locations for over 50 events. Some of the 30 event locations in the United States include:
Here is an ambigram with the event logo, which was designed by Scott Kim. The logo is rotationally symmetric.
The Wolfram Technology Conference 2010 is off to a great start! In his opening keynote, Wolfram Research Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram unveiled the forthcoming Mathematica 8. Through real-time demonstrations, attendees got to see many of the new features at work, including enhanced image processing capabilities, texture mapping, control systems, wavelet analysis, and much more. Over 500 new functions are being added in Version 8—almost the same as the total amount included in the original Version 1!
This year’s schedule covers a broad range of topics presented by users and Wolfram developers, including applications for probability and statistics, CUDA and Open CL programming, creating visualizations with Mathematica, and high-performance computation.
Mathematica has always had the most complete collection of special functions available. You might think that by now there were no more to add, but the next release of Mathematica will add another five. You might also think that any that are left to add are too obscure for you to care about. They are getting fairly obscure, but you should still care.
Let’s look at one of them: Owen’s T function.
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I recently was asked about Fibonacci Day. I think I replied “What is Fibonacci Day?” Then the person explained it. November 23 is 11/23. Or 1, 1, 2, 3—the start of the Fibonacci sequence.
Other yearly math-related days I found were Pi Day (3/14), Foursquare Day (4/16), Pi Approximation Day (22/7, in European format), Opposite Day (12/21), and Mole Day (6:02 10/23).
A lot of these seem a bit arbitrary. I thought I might be able to do better, so here’s what I came up with for the month of September.
Buried deep in the list of new technology in the Mathematica development pipeline was the item “integration of oscillatory functions (univariate, multivariate)—new algorithm”. I expect most people will overlook it, as I did, in favor of the new functions, new directions, big infrastructure, and the eye candy. Even worse, most people who will use it won’t even know—it will be selected automatically when needed, like many of Mathematica’s algorithms. So I think it’s my duty to share my discovery that this algorithm is actually really cool.
Why is it so cool?
The first clue I had was when I read in the notes that this was the first time anyone had fully automated the algorithm into a very wide class of problems. Second, that it was a hybrid numeric-symbolic method (putting it beyond the reach of most numerical systems). And finally, that it was developed by the talented Wolfram Research developer Andrew Moylan.
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