What does programming have to do with a passion for the arts and history? Well, if you turn education into a game and add a bit of coding, then you can easily end up in the realm of a modern paradigm called, fancily, "gamification." Though gamification is a very wide concept based on game use in non-game contexts (design, security, marketing, even protein folding, you name it), at heart it is very simple: play, have fun, and get things done. I may have oversimplified things here for the sake of a rhyme, but if you bear with my lengthy prelude, we may just see a simple case of turning passion into software. My obsession with diagrams and simple line drawings began almost unnoticeably in the winter of 2003 in New York City after attending an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "the first comprehensive survey of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings ever presented in America." You may think it'd be a drag---crowds marching very slowly in a single long line coiling through the exhibition hallways. But perception of time transforms when you stare at 500-year-old craft. I think it was then that it started to dawn on me what special value a first sketch has. A first act when an idea, something very subjective, evasive, living solely inside one's mind, materializes as a solid reality, now perceivable by another human being. Imagine it happened ages ago. Wouldn't you be curious what was going on at that moment in time, what got frozen in this piece of craft in front of you?

The National Museum of Mathematics, which opened in Manhattan in December, doesn't have a logo. It has an infinite family of logos. And the logos the museum uses for official business are not created by design professionals. They're designed by the museum's visitors. The logo is itself an exhibit in the museum. The museum's unique meta-logo was conceived and implemented at Wolfram Research. When I say "implemented," I don't mean just "calculated" or "rendered," but actually "programmed." This is a logo that requires an implementation.