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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
Announcements & Events

What Can You Say in One Line of the Wolfram Language? The 2017 One-Liner Competition

The One-Liner Competition is a tradition at our annual Wolfram Technology Conference, which took place at our headquarters in Champaign, Illinois, two weeks ago. We challenge attendees to show us the most impressive effects they can achieve with 128 characters or fewer of Wolfram Language code. We are never disappointed, and often surprised by what they show us can be done with the language we work so hard to develop—the language we think is the world's most powerful and fun. This year's winning submissions included melting flags, computer vision and poetry. Read on to see how far you can go with just a few characters of Wolfram Language code...
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
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