Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2007

Products

Gizmos, Gadgets and Gears

I do love gadgets, linkages, clockworks, all that 19th-century cogs-and-wheels technology. So much easier to see than our 21st-century nanotubes and zillion transistors on a chip.

Sándor Kabai has written many Demonstrations illustrating such mechanisms.

What makes these interesting is that playing with the various parameters lets you vary both the geometric setup and the controls that make the mechanism go through its motion.

George Beck, Document & Media Systems
Announcements & Events

Mathematics, Mathematica and Certainty

Not a lot gets written in the general press about foundational issues in mathematics, but this afternoon I found myself talking to a journalist about the subject of certainty in mathematics. It turned out to be a pretty interesting conversation, so I thought I’d write here about a few things that came up. Mathematics likes […]

Stephen Wolfram
Leading Edge

Creating My Website with Mathematica

As readers of this blog might know, I have an unhealthy interest in the chemical elements. And Mathematica. The combination means that all my element-related projects are created using almost no tools other than Mathematica. It’s not that I use it because I feel like I should---I certainly use other programs when appropriate (Photoshop, for example). It’s just that Mathematica is the best available tool for many of the things I want to do. Really. My latest project is the website periodictable.com. Let me say right off the bat that this is a fabulous domain name. It took me months of convincing and no small amount of cash to acquire it. It really deserves to host the definitive online periodic table reference website, not just another run-of-the-mill online periodic table, of which there are thousands. Take a quick look at it here.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press
Announcements & Events

Hidden in Plain Sight

Last month, we hosted our annual technology conference here at our headquarters in Champaign, Illinois, where hundreds of Mathematica users from around the world came to show us what they’ve been working on and to see what we’ve been up to. A lot of the conference presentations are now available on our website, so you can take a look at them even if you didn’t have a chance to attend this year.
Nilay Gandhi, Corporate Communications
Computation & Analysis

A Thousand Points of Light

The spinthariscope, invented and beautifully named by William Crookes in 1903, is a device for seeing individual atoms. Or at least, seeing the death of individual atoms. A spinthariscope consists of a needle, similar to a watch hand, positioned in front of a zinc sulfide luminous screen, with a magnifying glass focused on the screen. At the end of the needle is a small patch of radioactive material. Originally radium was used; more recently polonium, uranium and americium have been found to be safer.
Theodore Gray, Cofounder, Wolfram Research, Inc.; Founder, Touch Press
Announcements & Events

The Prize Is Won; The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved

“And although it will no doubt be very difficult to prove, it seems likely that this Turing machine will in the end turn out to be universal.” So I wrote on page 709 of A New Kind of Science (NKS). I had searched the computational universe for the simplest possible universal Turing machine. And I […]

Stephen Wolfram
Products

The Day That Documents and Applications Merged

My announcement last Thursday that you can publish almost any Mathematica notebook so it’s interactive in our free Wolfram Player brings about much more of a change than you might first think. In my Technology Conference talk, I explained how this new Publish for Wolfram Player service removes one of the last hurdles to making new applications as everyday as new documents. And in turn that initiates a new era of communicating technical ideas.
Conrad Wolfram
Show More