Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Date Archive: 2014 July

Education & Academic

Creating Escher-Inspired Art with Mathematica

Kenzo Nakamura uses Mathematica to create Escher-inspired mathematical art. His trademark piece, Three-Circle Mandala, depicts a large circle covered by three smaller, repeating circles that form a Sierpinksi gasket. When Nakamura began using Mathematica, he didn’t originally intend to use it for his artistic endeavors. He found the program by chance at a seminar while looking for the right tool to help him write his master’s thesis. Now, in addition to using Mathematica for technical and operations research, Nakamura uses it to create Mathematica-derived visual illusions. Although his works are static drawings, their infinite properties create the illusion of movement. Watch Nakamura discuss using Mathematica to create his drawings, and see a few of his creations. (YouTube in Japanese)
Products

Announcing Wolfram SystemModeler 4

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. Today we are proud to announce the release of Wolfram SystemModeler 4. For SystemModeler 4, we have expanded the supported model libraries to cover many new areas. We've also improved workflows for everything from learning the software to developing models to analyzing and deploying them. People have been using SystemModeler in an astonishing variety of areas. Many of those have been well supported by built-in libraries, but many are totally new domains where models typically need to be built from scratch. For most applications, using existing model libraries gives a real boost to productivity, but developing a good library takes a lot of effort. There are many aspects to think of: the best structure for easy modeling, the right level of detail, the interfaces to other components, which components to include, documentation, etc. And you may very well have to refactor the library more than once before you're done. Reusing components and interfaces from already tested and documented libraries not only speeds up development and learning, but also improves quality. So we've made SystemModeler's already broad collection of built-in libraries even larger. For instance, we've added Digital, for digital electronics following the VHDL multivalued logic standard; QuasiStationary, for efficient approximate modeling of large analog circuits; and FundamentalWave, for modeling multiphase electrical machines. There are also many improvements to existing libraries, such as support for thermal ports in the Rotational and Translational mechanics libraries so that heat losses can be captured.
Computation & Analysis

How Citizen Computation Changes Democracy: Conrad Wolfram at TEDxHousesofParliament

Photography by Tracy Howl and Paul Clarke Has our newfound massive availability of data improved decisions and lead to better democracy around the world? Most would say, "It's highly questionable." Conrad Wolfram's TEDx UK Parliament talk poses this question and explains how computation can be key to the answer, bridging the divide between availability and practical accessibility of data, individualized answers, and the democratization of new knowledge generation. This transformation will be critical not only to government efficiency and business effectiveness---but will fundamentally affect education, society, and democracy as a whole. Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica 10 demos feature throughout---including a live Wolfram Language generated tweet. More about Wolfram's solutions for your organization's data »
Announcements & Events

Launching Mathematica 10—
with 700+ New Functions and a Crazy Amount of R&D

We’ve got an incredible amount of new technology coming out this summer. Two weeks ago we launched Wolfram Programming Cloud. Today I’m pleased to announce the release of a major new version of Mathematica: Mathematica 10. We released Mathematica 1 just over 26 years ago—on June 23, 1988. And ever since we’ve been systematically making […]