I get to show off the power of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, and our other technologies to lots of interesting people, but last Friday was more interesting than usual, as David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, came to our European headquarters.

United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron with Conrad Wolfram

We have been growing consistently, and our UK location finally ran out of room for the extra staff that we were hiring, so we built a brand new set of offices on a former film studio site (I am told an underwater scene from one of the Superman movies was filmed under my office location). The Prime Minister came to perform the official opening.

Cameron did a TED Talk about the democratizing potential of using technology to drive accountability and transparency of government, so I was keen to show him some Wolfram|Alpha examples on crime, the economy, energy, and health, and we talked about the potential that it offered. We also talked about our ComputerBasedMath.org project to build a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart.

One dilemma presented was how to signify the opening. Cutting ribbons or pulling curtains back on a plaque seemed rather old fashioned, so we fed some live Wolfram|Alpha data into a virtual plaque, which was dynamically generated on our wall-mounted monitor as the Prime Minister touched an iPad screen.

Here is the image with the “facts of the moment” as generated by David Cameron:

For a little more on the visit, go to ConradWolfram.com.