April 24, 2012 — Vitaliy Kaurov, Technical Communication & Strategy
With nearly 8,000 interactive knowledge apps available on a huge variety of topics in the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, you’re bound to find one—or more—that you want to share.
Now you can easily embed any Demonstration you like on your own blog or website in one step. Watch this short video or read on to see how (we recommend viewing the video in full-screen mode):
April 25, 2011 — Christopher Carlson, Technical Communication & Strategy
The Wolfram Demonstrations Challenge has run its course, and you have participated in droves. It’s time to pick the winners.
We do things our own way at Wolfram Research. We don’t pull slips of paper from a hat or ping-pong balls from a barrel for prize drawings. We write Mathematica programs to tell us who the winners are. Of course.
I wrote the program, but not wanting to expose myself to accusations of improperly influencing my laptop, I didn’t run it myself. Stephen Wolfram did and sent me the results.
And the winners are…
April 4, 2011 — Christopher Carlson, Technical Communication & Strategy
As a long-time developer at Wolfram Research, I can attest that the job requires superhuman discipline and self-control. Those who lack fortitude are soon undone by the irresistible functionality we build into Mathematica and spend their days exploring the esoteric topics they’ve always wondered about instead of building more great technology.
The situation has recently gotten worse.
March 8, 2011 — Vitaliy Kaurov, Technical Communication & Strategy
Today we are pleased to announce an exciting new phase in the development of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. In addition to its slick new design and structure, allowing for more intuitive navigation, the website now features a groundbreaking technology that takes interactivity on the web to a whole new level. This technology tightly integrates live computations into the web browser, making interaction with Demonstrations a fluent part of the online experience.
Powered by a new web browser plugin, each Demonstration’s dynamic interface is now an element of the web page, similar to text, images, or videos, and yet is so much more than the typical inert content. Sliders, buttons, 3D graphic manipulations, color palettes, and the rest of the Wolfram interactive arsenal are now at your fingertips. They provide dynamic access to Mathematica’s universal engine spanning vast areas of pure and applied math, image processing, finance, control systems, wavelet analysis, and much more.
September 29, 2010 — Ed Pegg Jr, Editor, Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Iteration usually increases complexity. For example, ponder the following “Fractal Maze”. The green lines mark the boundaries of a frame that shows the black paths of a maze. Copies of that frame and the paths are copied inside. With 4 levels of nested frames, it is possible to get from 1 to 8 on the outer frame. When pictures are repeated inside themselves, it’s usually called the Droste effect.
August 6, 2010 — Ed Pegg Jr, Editor, Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Pick some points at random. What can be said about them? What curves go through them? What polygons and polynomials can be made from them? Deep mathematics lurks behind these questions, but the answers can be explored just by moving points around within some Wolfram Demonstrations.
Simply by moving points you can see deep mathematics in action.
For example, “Five Points Determine a Conic Section” (Ed Pegg Jr and Paul Abbott) uses a matrix determinant on five points to produce an equation going through all five points.
July 27, 2010 — Marty McKee, Copywriter
You already know that Mathematica can do anything technical—modeling, simulation, development, documentation, and so on.
But it’s also a great tool for relaxing. When you need to take a break from your engineering project or math homework, you don’t have to shut down Mathematica. Clear your head with one of these fun activities created by Mathematica users for the Wolfram Demonstrations Project.
July 22, 2009 — George Beck, Scientific Information Group
Last week we proudly celebrated the milestone of 5,000 Demonstrations. As each one is a separate program, this represents a huge collaborative software development.
And now, every Demonstration has its preview animation available on YouTube. Each has a unique soundtrack created with variations on a custom WolframTones selection.
Some facts and figures: over the last year, there have been nearly 14 million visits to all Demonstrations pages, with 3.5 million unique visitors to the main site. As stated in the previous blog post, Demonstrations have been viewed over 6 million times. Over 1 million notebooks have been downloaded using the Mathematica Player and over half a million source notebooks have been downloaded.
Here are the top Demonstration topics:
July 13, 2009 — Conrad Wolfram, Director of Strategic & International Development
Today we passed a remarkable milestone: the 5,000th Demonstration was published by the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, the free, interactive resource we created in 2007.
This makes the Demonstrations Project the largest collection of open, instructional applets anywhere. And it’s also much needed proof that you can create a viable and vibrant technical publishing ecosystem based on interactive applications rather than dead documents—pivotal to moving technical communication into a major new era.
What’s the significance of this?
May 28, 2009 — Nick Gaskill, Documentation Project Coordinator
Have you ever wanted a set of straightforward, step-by-step instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a specific task with Mathematica? Have you ever thought that a Mathematica “quick-reference guide” would be useful? If so, take a look at the “How To” Topics in Version 7. “How tos” are a new type of documentation in Mathematica 7 that provide just the information you need without a lot of detailed background information.
This task-oriented approach makes these “How tos” ideal for those getting started with Mathematica. Some students, educators, researchers, and others that would benefit from using Mathematica feel that it would take too long to learn, or is just too complex to use. While this sentiment might seem reasonable given the computational power and breadth of features available in Mathematica, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
