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Hidden Figures: Modern Approaches to Orbit and Reentry Calculations

The movie Hidden Figures was released in theaters recently and has been getting good reviews. It also deals with an important time in US history, touching on a number of topics, including civil rights and the Space Race. The movie details the hidden story of Katherine Johnson and her coworkers (Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson) at NASA during the Mercury missions and the United States' early explorations into manned space flight. The movie focuses heavily on the dramatic civil rights struggle of African American women in NASA at the time, and these struggles are set against the number-crunching ability of Johnson and her coworkers. Computers were in their early days at this time, so Johnson and her team's ability to perform complicated navigational orbital mechanics problems without the use of a computer provided an important sanity check against the early computer results.
Jeff Bryant, et al.
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Analyzing and Translating an Alien Language: Arrival, Logograms and the Wolfram Language

If aliens actually visited Earth, world leaders would bring in a scientist to develop a process for understanding their language. So when director Denis Villeneuve began working on the science fiction movie Arrival, he and his team turned to real-life computer scientists Stephen and Christopher Wolfram to bring authentic science to the big screen. Christopher specifically was tasked with analyzing and writing code for a fictional nonlinear visual language. On January 31, he demonstrated the development process he went through in a livecoding event you can watch on YouTube.
Michael Gammon, Blog Administrator, Document & Media Systems
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Exploring a Boxing Legend’s Career with the Wolfram Language: Ali at 75

Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942--June 3, 2016) is considered one of the greatest heavyweight boxers in history, with a record of 56 wins and 5 losses. He remains the only three-time lineal heavyweight champion, so there's no doubt why he is nicknamed "The Greatest." I used the Wolfram Language to create several visualizations to celebrate his work and gain some new insights into his life. Last June, I wrote a Wolfram Community post about Ali's career. On what would have been The Greatest's 75th birthday, I wanted to take a minute to explore the larger context of Ali's career, from late-career boxing stats to poetry. First, I created a PieChart showing Ali's record:
Jofre Espigulé-Pons, Machine Learning
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Mersenne Primes and the Lucas–Lehmer Test

Introduction

A Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form Mp = 2p – 1, where the exponent p must also be prime. These primes take their name from the French mathematician and religious scholar Marin Mersenne, who produced a list of primes of this form in the first half of the seventeenth century. It has been known since antiquity that the first four of these, M2 = 3, M3 = 7, M5 = 31 and M7 = 127, are prime.
John McGee, Applications Developer, Wolfram Technology Group
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Finding Pokémon GO’s Shortest Tour to Compute ’em All!

There's a Computed Pokémon nearby! Here is a Poké Spikey. This will help you catch ’em all! In this blog post I will share with you several data insights about the viral social media phenomenon that is Pokémon GO. First I will get you familiarized with the original 151 Pokémon that have now invaded our real world, and then I'll show you how to find the shortest tour to visit your nearby gyms.
Bernat Espigulé-Pons, OSW Operations
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Finding the Most Unhygienic Food in the UK

The UK, like many other countries, runs a food hygiene inspection system that tries to ensure that establishments with poor hygiene standards improve or are shut down. As is often the case, the data collected for operational reasons can provide a rich source of insight when viewed as a whole. Questions like "Where in the UK has the poorest food hygiene?", "What kinds of places are the most unhygienic?", and "What kinds of food are the most unhygienic?" spring to mind. I thought I would apply Mathematica and a little basic data science and provide the answers. The collected data, over half a million records, is updated daily and is openly available from an API, but this API seems to be targeted at performing individual lookups, so I found it more efficient to import the 414 files from this site instead.
Jon McLoone, Director, Technical Communication & Strategy
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Aspect Ratios in Art: What Is Better Than Being Golden? Being Plastic, Rooted, or Just Rational? Investigating Aspect Ratios of Old vs. Modern Paintings

Paintings of the great masters are among the most beautiful human artifacts ever produced. They are treasured and admired, carefully preserved, sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and, perhaps not coincidentally, are the prime target of art thieves. Their composition, colors, details, and themes can fascinate us for hours. But what about their outer shape---the ratio of a painting's height to its width? In 1876, the German scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner studied human responses to rectangular shapes, concluding that rectangles with an aspect ratio equal to the golden ratio are most pleasing to the human eye. To validate his experimental observations, Fechner also analyzed the aspect ratios of more than ten thousand paintings. We can find out more about Fechner with the following piece of code:
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
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2 Pi or Not 2 Pi?

Three months ago the world (or at least the geek world) celebrated Pi Day of the Century (3/14/15...). Today (6/28) is another math day: 2π-day, or Tau Day (2π = 6.28319...). Some say that Tau Day is really the day to celebrate, and that τ(=2π) should be the most prominent constant, not π. It all started in 2001 with the famous opening line of a watershed essay by Bob Palais, a mathematician at the University of Utah: "I know it will be called blasphemy by some, but I believe that π is wrong." Which has given rise in some circles to the celebration of Tau Day—or, as many people say, the one day on which you are allowed to eat two pies. But is it true that τ is the better constant? In today's world, it's quite easy to test, and the Wolfram Language makes this task much simpler. (Indeed, Michael Trott's recent blog post on dates in pi—itself inspired by Stephen Wolfram's Pi Day of the Century post—made much use of the Wolfram Language.) I started by looking at 320,000 preprints from arXiv.org to see in practice how many formulas involve 2π rather than π alone, or other multiples of π. Here is a WordCloud of some formulas containing 2π:
Giorgia Fortuna, Advanced Research Group
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