Only four weeks to go until the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011 in Champaign, Illinois, and in order to help you prepare, the full conference schedule is now available online—fully interactive and customizable.

As of this year, you can create your schedule, network with fellow attendees, arrange meetings with Wolfram staff and other participants, and rate talks and share comments throughout the conference. More »

Neil Bickford calculated the first 458 million terms for the continued fraction of pi, breaking the previous record of 180 million. He used Mathematica to develop his code and verify his results—which he posted shortly after he turned 13.

Neil Bickford meets Stephen Wolfram at Gathering 4 Gardner 9.

Bickford, who broke the record last fall, said creating the early version of the pi continued-fraction generator was “the best thing I’ve ever used Mathematica for.” More »

As a change from my usual recreational content, today I thought I would describe a real Mathematica application that I wrote. The project came from my most important Mathematica user—not because she spends a lot of money with Wolfram Research, but because I am married to her!

Her company, Particle Therapeutics, works on needle-free injection devices that fire powdered drug particles into the skin on a supersonic gas shock wave. She was trying to analyze the penetration characteristics on a test medium by photographing thin slices of a target under a microscope and measuring the locations of the particles.

The problem was that her expensive image processing software was doing a poor job of identifying overlapping particles and gave her no manual override for its mistakes.

Faced with the alternative of holding rulers up to her screen and recording each value by hand, I promised that I could do better in Mathematica, with the added advantage that now her image processing tool would be integrated into her analysis code to go from image file to report document in a single workflow. More »

Mathematica 8 added a slew of powerful finance functions to its already large list of capabilities when it was released last November. To help highlight some of these features as well as assist those who want to use them, Wolfram Research is presenting both a finance workshop and a free seminar at the Club Quarters, Wall Street hotel in New York City on September 15. More »