News, Views & Insights

Date Archive: 2021 November

Announcements & Events

Six Reasons Why the Wolfram Language Is (Like) Open Source

November 30, 2021

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece outlining why I think that open source isn’t the right business model for Wolfram’s core tech. It generated some (mostly reasonable) debate about the benefits of different models.

Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy

Best of Blog

The Winners of the 2021 One-Liner Competition

November 24, 2021

The Wolfram Language is renowned for simplicity and brevity, and nowhere was that more apparent than at the 10th annual One-Liner Competition, held at the Wolfram Virtual Technology Conference. The contest challenges conference attendees to create the best program possible in 128 characters or fewer (the original length limit of a tweet). With prizes awarded for the three best submissions, competition this year was fierce, but the judges, with only minor bloodshed, were able to settle on a slate of awardees.

Paco Jain, Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content

Education & Academic

A New Method of Bell Ringing Using Mathematica to Discover Wolf Wrap

November 19, 2021

English bell ringing (called change ringing) has many connections to mathematics, notably to group theory and Hamiltonian cycles. My wife, Joan Hutchinson, is an ardent bell ringer (having rung in both England and North America), and I knew the basics of this ancient craft. A recent puzzle book by Mark Davies [1] inspired me to bring Mathematica’s integer-linear programming (ILP) capabilities to bear, but I wanted to go beyond puzzles and develop a new ringing method that would be of interest to the bell-ringing community.

Stan Wagon, Guest Author

Announcements & Events

13 Ways of Looking at the Number 13

November 9, 2021

Why are we releasing Version 13 of Mathematica?

As a math and science company, Wolfram doesn’t fear two-digit number integers, especially that particular one between 12 and 14. That is to say, we don’t have triskaidekaphobia, not on Friday the 13th or any other day of the year.

Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group

Education & Academic

Lessons Learned Migrating from Python to the Wolfram Language

November 4, 2021

Since I started working at Wolfram, I have been almost exclusively using Mathematica, not only as computing software but also as a program in which to write documents. I very quickly felt comfortable using Mathematica in both of these capacities, but I had yet to truly use it as a programming platform with the Wolfram Language.

David Stevens, Academic Key Account Manager, Academic Sales