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Education & Academic

Mathematics Genealogy Project: Computational Exploration in the Wolfram Language

The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a project dedicated to the compilation of information about all mathematicians of the world, storing this information in a database and exposing it via a web-based search interface. The MGP database contains more than 230,000 mathematicians as of July 2018, and has continued to grow roughly linearly in size since its inception in 1997.

In order to make this data more accessible and easily computable, we created an internal version of the MGP data using the Wolfram Language’s entity framework. Using this dataset within the Wolfram Language allows one to easily make computations and visualizations that provide interesting and sometimes unexpected insights into mathematicians and their works. Note that for the time being, these entities are defined only in our private dataset and so are not (yet) available for general use.
Aaron Enright, Senior Data Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Socioeconomic Content Eric Weisstein, Senior Researcher, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

The Shape of the Vote: Exploring Congressional Districts with Computation

In the past few decades, the process of redistricting has moved squarely into the computational realm, and with it the political practice of gerrymandering. But how can one solve the problem of equal representation mathematically? And what can be done to test the fairness of districts? In this post I’ll take a deeper dive with the Wolfram Language—using data exploration with Import and Association, built-in knowledge through the Entity framework and various GeoGraphics visualizations to better understand how redistricting works, where issues can arise and how to identify the effects of gerrymandering.

Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Education & Academic

User Research: Deep Learning for Gravitational Wave Detection with the Wolfram Language

Daniel George is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wolfram Summer School alum and Wolfram intern whose award-winning research on deep learning for gravitational wave detection recently landed in the prestigious pages of Physics Letters B in a special issue commemorating the Nobel Prize in 2017. We sat down with Daniel to learn more about his research and how the Wolfram Language plays a part in it.
Swede White, Public Relations Manager
Computation & Analysis

Web Scraping with the Wolfram Language, Part 1: Importing and Interpreting

Do you want to do more with data available on the web? Meaningful data exploration requires computation—and the Wolfram Language is well suited to the tasks of acquiring and organizing data. I'll walk through the process of importing information from a webpage into a Wolfram Notebook and extracting specific parts for basic computation. Throughout this post, I'll be referring to this website hosted by the National Weather Service, which gives 7-day forecasts for locations in the western US:
Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Computation & Analysis

Computational Gastronomy: Using the Wolfram Language to Prepare a Sumptuous Holiday Feast

In recent years there's been a growing interest in the intersection of food and technology. However, many of the new technologies used in the kitchen are cooking tools and devices such as immersion circulators, silicone steam baskets and pressure ovens. Here at Wolfram, our approach has been a bit different, with a focus on providing tools that can query for, organize, visualize and compute data about food, cooking and nutrition. Last Christmas I went home to Tucson, Arizona, to spend time with my family over the holidays. Because I studied the culinary arts and food science, I was quickly enlisted to cook Christmas dinner. There were going to be a lot of us at my parents' house, so I was aware this would be no small task. But I curate food and nutrition data for Wolfram|Alpha, so I knew the Wolfram technology stack had some excellent resources for pulling off this big meal without a hitch.
Micah Lindley, Junior Research Programmer, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Best of Blog

What Is a Computational Essay?

A Powerful Way to Express Ideas People are used to producing prose—and sometimes pictures—to express themselves. But in the modern age of computation, something new has become possible that I’d like to call the computational essay. I’ve been working on building the technology to support computational essays for several decades, but it’s only very recently […]

Stephen Wolfram
Education & Academic

What Is a Computational Essay? (Russian)

Высокоэффективный способ выражения идей

Люди привыкли к созданию прозы, а иногда изображений, для самовыражения. Но в современную эпоху вычислений появилось нечто новое, что я хотел бы назвать вычислительным эссе.

Я работаю над созданием технологии для поддержки вычислительных эссе уже в течение нескольких десятилетий, но только совсем недавно я понял, насколько вычислительные эссе могут быть важны как для формы обучения людей, так и для их формы обмена фактами и идеями. Профессионалы будущего будут регулярно предоставлять результаты и отчеты как вычислительные эссе. Педагоги будут регулярно объяснять концепции, используя вычислительные эссе. Студенты будут регулярно создавать вычислительные эссе в качестве домашней работы для своих классов.

Вот очень простой пример вычислительного эссе:

Stephen Wolfram
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