It’s been a busy year here at the Wolfram Blog. We’ve written about ways to avoid the UK’s most unhygienic foods, exciting new developments in mathematics and even how you can become a better Pokémon GO player. Here are some of our most popular stories from the year.

Today We Launch Version 11!

In August, we launched Version 11 of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. The result of two years of development, Version 11 includes exciting new functionality like the expanded map generation enabled by satellite images. Here’s what Wolfram CEO Stephen Wolfram had to say about the new release in his blog post:

OK, so what’s the big new thing in Version 11? Well, it’s not one big thing; it’s many big things. To give a sense of scale, there are 555 completely new functions that we’re adding in Version 11—representing a huge amount of new functionality (by comparison, Version 1 had a total of 551 functions altogether). And actually that function count is even an underrepresentation—because it doesn’t include the vast deepening of many existing functions.

Finding the Most Unhygienic Food in the UK

Using the Wolfram Language, John McLoone analyzes government data about food safety inspections to create visualizations of the most unhygienic food in the UK. The post is a treasure trove of maps and charts of food establishments that should be avoided at all costs, and includes McLoone’s greatest tip for food safety: “If you really care about food hygiene, then the best advice is probably just to never be rude to the waiter until after you have gotten your food!”

Finding Pokémon GO’s Shortest Tour to Compute ’em All!

Bernat Espigulé-Pons creates visualizations of Pokémon across multiple generations of the game and then uses WikipediaData, GeoDistance and FindShortestTour to create a map to local Pokémon GO gyms. If you’re a 90s kid or an avid gamer, Espigulé-Pons’s Pokémon genealogy is perfect gamer geek joy. If you’re not, this post might just help to explain what all those crowds were doing in your neighborhood park earlier this year.

Behind Wolfram|Alpha’s Mathematical Induction-Based Proof Generator

Connor Flood writes about creating “the world’s first online syntax-free proof generator using induction,” which he designed using Wolfram|Alpha. With a detailed explanation of the origin of the concept and its creation from development to prototyping, this post provides a glimpse into the ways that computational thinking applications are created.

An Exact Value for the Planck Constant: Why Reaching It Took 100 Years

Wolfram|Alpha Chief Scientist Michael Trott returns with a post about the history of the discovery of the exact value of the Planck constant, covering everything from the base elements of superheroes to the redefinition of the kilogram.

Launching the Wolfram Open Cloud: Open Access to the Wolfram Language

In January of 2016, we launched the Wolfram Open Cloud to—as Stephen Wolfram says in his blog post about the launch—“let anyone in the world use the Wolfram Language—and do sophisticated knowledge-based programming—free on the web.” You can read more about this integrated cloud-based computing platform in his January post.

On the Detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO

In February, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that it had confirmed the first detection of a gravitational wave. Wolfram software engineer Jason Grigsby explains what gravitational waves are and why the detection of them by LIGO is such an exciting landmark in experimental physics.

Computational Stippling: Can Machines Do as Well as Humans?

Silvia Hao uses Mathematica to recreate the renaissance engraving technique of stippling: a kind of drawing style using only points to mimic lines, edges and grayscale. Her post is filled with intriguing illustrations and is a wonderful example of the intersection of math and illustration/drawing.

Newest Wolfram Technologies Books Cover Range of STEM Topics

In April, we reported on new books that use Wolfram technology to explore a variety of STEM topics, from data analysis to engineering. With resources for teachers, researchers and industry professionals and books written in English, Japanese and Spanish, there’s a lot of Wolfram reading to catch up on!

Announcing Wolfram Programming Lab

The year 2016 also saw the launch of Wolfram Programming Lab, an interactive online platform for learning to program in the Wolfram Language. Programming Lab includes a digital version of Stephen Wolfram’s 2016 book, An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language, as well as Explorations for programmers already familiar with other languages and numerous examples for those who learn best by experimentation.