News, Views & Insights
We’re pleased that despite the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on so many people and businesses we’re still able to launch today as planned… (Thanks to our dedicated team and the fact that remote working has been part of our company for decades…) The Biggest .1 Release Ever It’s always an interesting time. We’re getting […]
Communities the world over are bracing themselves for impact from the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Many school districts in particular have already suspended sessions for several weeks to come—and understandably, parents and educators feel anxious about navigating at-home learning (among the variety of other concerns brought about by a pandemic!).
Professionally, a large part of what I do at Wolfram involves working with educators, students and organizations, and empowering them with the technology to think computationally. I know of several parents with older kids who are now at home, enrolled in schools that are not completely prepared to provide online instruction. While the internet is awash with curricula, it can be a challenging task to assess the quality, relevance and usefulness of each course, given the amount of what is out there.
For decades now at Wolfram, we’ve been committed to the creation of cutting-edge technology and resources for classrooms. Let’s take a look at our wealth of free online resources for quality education while at home.Who has not encountered a stink bug? Perhaps the better question is not if, but when. I remember well my first interactions with stink bugs—partly because of their pungent, cilantro-like odor, but also because in my native Catalan language they are called Bernat pudent ("stinky Bernat") and Bernat is my twin brother's name.
So when I encountered the stink bug again when visiting Champaign, Illinois, for the 2019 Wolfram Technology Conference, it brought up a lot of fond childhood memories. This time, however, two things had changed: the frequency of encounters with the stink bug seemed exponentially greater, and I now had the Wolfram Language to more fully (and computationally) satisfy my curiosity about this reviled insect and its growing impact on our ecosystem. So to get a better picture of the arrival and spread of this invasive bug across the US, I used available observation data and the Wolfram Language to make a map of sightings over the past two decades.
With the recent announcement of the all-new Raspberry Pi 4, we are proud to announce that our latest development, Version 12 of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language, is available for you to use when you get your hands on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Mathematica 12 is a major milestone in our journey that has spanned 30 years, significantly extending the reach of Mathematica and introducing a whole array of new features, including significant expansion of numerical, mathematic and geometric computation, audio and signal processing, text and language processing, machine learning, neural networks and much more. Version 12 gives Mathematica users new levels of power and effectiveness. With thousands of different updates across the system, and 278 new functions in 103 areas, there is so much to explore.
You know what’s harder than learning the piano? Learning the piano without a piano, and without any knowledge of music theory. For me, acquiring a real piano was out of the question; I had neither the funds nor space in my small college apartment. So naturally, it looked like I would have to build one myself—digitally, of course. And luckily, I had Mathematica, Unity and a few hours to spare. Because working in Unity is incredibly quick and efficient with the Wolfram Language and UnityLink, I’ve created a playable section of piano, and even learned a bit of music theory in the process.
The Wolfram Language gives programmers a unique computational language with an enormous array of sophisticated algorithms and built-in real-world knowledge. For many years, people have asked us how to access all the power of our technology from other software environments and programming languages. And over the years, we have built many such connections, like Wolfram CloudConnector for Excel, WSTP (Wolfram Symbolic Transfer Protocol) for C/C++ programs and, of course, J/Link, which provides access to the Wolfram Language directly from Java.
So today we're happy to formally announce a new and often-requested connection that allows you to call the Wolfram Language directly and efficiently from Python: the Wolfram Client Library for Python. And, even better, this client library is fully open source as the WolframClientForPython git repository under the MIT License, so you can clone it and use it any way you see fit.
Over the years, I have been asked many times about my opinions on free and open-source software. Sometimes the questions are driven by comparison to some promising or newly fashionable open-source project, sometimes by comparison to a stagnating open-source project and sometimes by the belief that Wolfram technology would be better if it were open source.
At the risk of provoking the fundamentalist end of the open-source community, I thought I would share some of my views in this blog. While there are counterexamples to most of what I have to say, not every point applies to every project, and I am somewhat glossing over the different kinds of “free” and “open,” I hope I have crystallized some key points.