Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2013 July

Announcements & Events

Announcing Wolfram Community

When 11-year-old Jesse Friedman won a programming prize at the Wolfram Technology Conference last year, I pondered the diversity of our global user community---from children to Nobel Prize laureates, from CTOs to astronauts, to the thousands of people on the planet who help the world tick every day using the tools we make. We always have a great atmosphere at our annual Technology Conference, where developers and users mingle and share their stories. Imagine if we could take this interaction and somehow make it available every day to everyone. We hope to achieve this with Wolfram Community, a new virtual home for our big family, which we are very pleased to announce today. Now the people who make our wonderful technologies and the people who use them to make wonderful things are just a few clicks away from each other. At the outset, Wolfram Community is a platform for questions and answers, idea sharing, and discussions about all of our technologies---including Mathematica, SystemModeler, Wolfram|Alpha, and all the rest. With time, not only do we envision uniting users across our technologies, but that the system will grow to provide additional features, including deeper integration with our products themselves, file sharing, and much more, offering a medium designed for creative collaboration. And if you already have a Wolfram ID, you’re all set to go—just sign in and start chatting.
Vitaliy Kaurov, Director of Community Engagement
Best of Blog

Using Formulas… for Everything—From a Complex Analysis Class to Political Cartoons to Music Album Covers

In my last blog post, I discussed how to construct closed-form trigonometric formulas for sketches of people’s faces. Using similar techniques, Wolfram|Alpha has recently added a collection of hundreds of such closed-form curves for faces, shapes, animals, logos and signatures. In today’s post, I want to show some of the entertaining things one can do with these parametrized curves. Although these are just simple curves, a large variety of fun images (and animations) can be constructed from them. These can then be used, for example, in political cartoons, talk shows, posters, music album covers or just to spice up an advanced calculus or first-year theoretical mechanics class. I will first discuss the fun applications, and then the more mathematical ones.
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Random and Optimal Mathematica Walks on IMDb’s Top Films

Or: How I Learned to Watch the Best Movies in the Best Way I remember when I lived across the street from an art movie theater called Le Club, looking at the movie posters on my way back home was often enough to get me in the ticket line. The director or main actors would ring a bell, or a close friend had recommended the title. Sometimes the poster alone would be appealing enough to lure me in. Even today there are still occasions when I make decisions from limited visual information, like when flipping through movie kiosks, TV guides, or a stack of DVDs written in languages I can't read. So how can Mathematica help? We'll take a look at the top 250 movies rated on IMDb. Based on their posters and genres, how can one create a program that suggests which movies to see? What is the best way to see the most popular movies in sequence?
Matthias Odisio, Software Developer, Algorithms R&D
Best of Blog

Using Mathematica to Simulate and Visualize Fluid Flow in a Box

The motion of fluid flow has captured the interest of philosophers and scientists for a long time. Leonardo da Vinci made several sketches of the motion of fluid and made a number of observations about how water and air behave. He often observed that water had a swirling motion, sometimes big and sometimes small, as shown in the sketch below. We would now call such swirling motions vortices, and we have a systematic way of understanding the behavior of fluids through the Navier–Stokes equations. Let's first start with understanding these equations.
Paritosh Mokhasi, Kernel Developer, Algorithms R&D