No, not a vow of silence, but rather, some suggestions about how to move documents from Microsoft Word into Mathematica. A number of us Wolfram Research staffers contributed to our recent Summer School effort by sharing mentoring duties. In my case I worked with Richard Werthamer, a physicist who is publishing a book on the science of casino gambling strategies. His project includes programs verifying his research, and he’s eager to translate them into Mathematica in order to exploit all the new dynamics and plotting features of Version 6. At the same time, he quite naturally wants to move his existing manuscript into Mathematica notebook form to deliver a computable document, combining text and interactive Mathematica content distributable on the Mathematica Player platform. Richard’s situation is pretty common. He prepared his manuscript with MS Word, and a great new feature delivered in Mathematica 6.0.3 allows for the exchange of MathML on the clipboard with MS Word 2007 straight “out of the box”. In other words, after creating a formula in Word using its new native math typesetting system, simply select the formula, copy, then switch to Mathematica to paste into a notebook.

I am lucky enough to find time to blog again about the NKS Summer School. Every year is different (see last year’s post), but some things remain the same. Everyone is very active: students doing homework and developing their projects, the instructors helping them and giving lectures and Stephen Wolfram advising students and doing live experiments. 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.