Here are some of the most recent updates we’ve made to The Wolfram Demonstrations Project.
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As Yoda said, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Other sayings appropriate to our task: “Never give up, never surrender,” and “If you fall off a cliff, you might as well try to fly.”

We are always doing something new at the Summer School, often using the latest features of Mathematica, but there is an intrinsic difference this time. We have more students and more instructors than ever before, which makes this brand of intense science even more intense.
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As I said in my last post, June is a special time around Wolfram Research. Given the fact that June 23rd was the 20th anniversary of Mathematica, there’s been more celebration this June than usual.

We started talking about the significance of Mathematica’s 20th birthday and what we should do in commemoration some time ago. We decided that one thing we would like do would be to create an online scrapbook.

Twenty years ago today—at noon (Pacific Time) on Thursday, June 23, 1988—Mathematica 1.0 was officially launched.

Much has changed in the world since then, particularly when it comes to computer technology.

But I’m happy to be able to say that Mathematica still seems as modern today as it did back then when it was first released. And if you take almost any Mathematica 1.0 program from 20 years ago, it’ll run without change in the latest Mathematica 6.0 today.

From the beginning, I had planned Mathematica for the long term. I wanted to build a system that could capture the essence of computation, and apply it wherever that became possible.

I spent great effort to get the fundamentals right—and to build the system on principles that would endure.

And looking back over the past two decades it’s satisfying to see how well that has worked out.
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When you think about it, having a 20th birthday is pretty remarkable for a piece of software. How many other software products do you use now that were around in 1988? More importantly, how many of them are still at the top of their game after so long? We’re pretty proud of the fact that Mathematica’s core design and functionality have stood the test of time.

We thought it would be appropriate to celebrate this anniversary by having a “memory museum” at this year’s picnic. Being the de facto company archivist (having once been the corporate librarian and having reached the “relic” status in both raw age and tenure at the company), I took on the role of organizing our displays.

We had a big collage of photos of employees past and present. An awful lot of blood, sweat, and tears have gone into the creation of Mathematica over the years and it only seemed right to highlight the people behind the product. Anyway, it’s always fun to note the passage of time through funny hairdos, expanding waistlines, and receding hairlines.

We wanted to show how Mathematica has changed over time, too. We came up with a few displays that seemed to show this fairly well. Here’s a graphic we used as a poster to show the disk space used by each of our major versions.

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If you’d like to test your knowledge of national flags, there is also a “Country Flag Quiz” Demonstration that you may download for free. Both of these Wolfram Demonstrations show off the power of the CountryData paclet. For example, Mathematica can analyze all those flag descriptions.
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As an editor for The Wolfram Demonstrations Project, I often get quite interested in new astronomy-related Demonstrations. One particular set, written by Sándor Kabai, focuses on the mechanics of not only the Phoenix Mars Lander, but probes from the past as well.

Landers, as opposed to other spacecraft, must overcome unique design challenges. Unlike orbiters, which typically have only sensors and cameras, landers usually have mechanical components to directly manipulate the surrounding environment like an astronaut could. These components come in many forms, such as wheels, scoops, drilling instruments, and so on, which make landers much more interesting to visualize interactively. Although these are not strictly astronomy, more engineering, few would argue that they are space-related and therefore pretty cool!

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When I was a kid, dinosaurs and secret codes were topics of surefire interest, since one was useful for eating your little sister and the other one for denying her the password to the clubhouse. I haven’t noticed any Demonstrations about dinosaurs yet (I continue to keep an eye out), but interesting ones about cryptography turn up regularly, including a couple of neat recent entries on visual encryption: Michael Schrieber’s Visual Encryption Pad and Paul van der Schaaf’s Graphical Modulo-4 Image Encryption.

One cipher (if you can call it that) common in my kiddie code books involved printing a message in red stipple overlaid with a noise field of blue stipple. You could use the piece of red cellophane included in the back of the book to mask out the blue part and reveal the secret message. The Visual Encryption Pad Demonstration is the sophisticated cousin of this scheme, involving the overlay of a random bit mask (the key) with another bit mask of the same size (the message). Applying a set of rules to the combination of bits at a given pixel (in the case of this Demonstration, XNOR) reveals the message, which might look like this:

If your spies in the field don’t have computers, and you are limited to passing around messages on microfilm or something, then the only bit-combination rule set you will be able to use is OR. And of course your messages are limited to one bit per pixel. The Graphical Modulo-4 Image Encryption scheme, on the other hand, can encode more than one bit per pixel, even on physical media. Let me quote some snippets of the Demonstration’s code and describe how they work, and then I’ll discuss a couple of extensions that suggest themselves.
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I was present at the first IMS in Southampton, England in 1995 and have attended most of them since. I have some fond memories of discussing computational theory under the midnight sun in Rovaniemi, Finland; getting to grips with the Tokyo subway system; explaining details of the Mathematica compiler in Hyde Park, London; and studying mussel shells (while enjoying seafood) in Fremantle, Australia. It’s interesting to see how both Mathematica and IMS have developed and grown in the last thirteen years.

What I like about IMS is its focus as a Mathematica user event. This gives it a contrast with the Mathematica technology conferences (these are typically held in Champaign, Illinois, in October). IMS presentations are by users and, since it is an interdisciplinary event, these are often very wide ranging but use Mathematica as a common thread. This uniform language means that material is often much more accessible to people outside the subject matter. It allows mathematicians, engineers, scientists, financiers, economists, and others, from education, industry, and research, to find a common meeting ground to exchange ideas and techniques. This variety gives attendees a good opportunity to get insight into other subjects, and perhaps learn new methods they can bring to their own work. It also gives them a good opportunity to compare and improve their use of Mathematica.

It is also interesting to meet the many different sorts of Mathematica users. I like to see the interesting ways that people apply Mathematica, often finding angles and aspects that we had not completely anticipated. I also like to get feedback on parts of the system that people would like to see improved and where they have trouble. Sometimes, of course, I can help them immediately with my own experience and knowledge, but sometimes improvements are longer term. There are a number of other Mathematica developers at IMS and I’m sure they all find it similarly rewarding.

Anyway, if you are interested in increasing your experience of Mathematica and getting involved in the community of users, I strongly urge you to attend the 9th IMS in Maastrict. You can find details on the IMS website. I hope to see you there.

I’m excited by any new features that enhance the document creation process in Mathematica. As an 18-year veteran of the company, I’ve interacted with the notebook front end since Version 2, and have been contributing to the interface and documentation systems since Version 3. I’ve recently taken on new responsibilities for managing some of our web applications, particularly online forms for both internal business and external customer interactions, and I’m eager to insert notebook-based source material and Mathematica controller logic into these systems. We have already done so with the Wolfram Mathematica Documentation Center and The Wolfram Demonstrations Project. Of all these systems, Demonstrations are the most visible to our users from their starting point through administrative stages to ultimate deployment, so let’s dissect the Demonstrations authoring form to expose its hidden talents.

If you haven’t done so already, you can open the authoring notebook from Mathematica’s File menu:

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